Christianity and Civilisation: Part 1, Foundations - Emil Brunner

CHRISTIANITY

AND
CIVILISATION

»

CHRISTIANITY
AND

CIVILISATION

By

EMIL BRUNNER

HRST PART :

FOUND A TIONS

GIFFORD LECrrURES DELIVERED AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS
1947

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
New York 1948

ComisHT, 1948c by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form mthont
tke ptrmissioH of Chorhi Scrtbtm't Sotu

A

PREFACE

NEVER, when about to publish a book, have I experienced
such a conflict of feelhig as I have in laying before the
public this first series of GifEord Lectures, delivered in
the University of St. Andrews in February and March, 1947.
On the one hand, for many years I have been convinced that
such an attempt at a Christian doctrine of the foundations of
civilisation is overdue, having regard in particular to the
situation and the responsibility of the Protestant churches. It
really ought to have been made long ago. What might not
have been avoided if it hadl Sometimes I even think it is
already too late. At any rate, if by the mercy of God we are to
have some further breaking space, if He does grant us another
chance to build up a new European civilisation on the ruins of
the old, facing all the time the possibility of an imminent end
to all civilised life on this globe, Christianity has a tremendous
responsibility.

in this book I seek to formulate and to justify my conviction
that only Christianity is capable of furnishing the basis of a
civilisation which can rightly be described as human. It is
obvious that a clear conception of tfaie relation between Christian-
ity and civilisation in their difEerent spheres is of paramount
importance for such a task. Therefore somebody has to begin,
however inadeqiiate may be his resources compared with the
immensity and difficulty of the work to be done.

It is this feeling of inescapable urgency which has prompted
me to hasten the publication of my first series of lectures, which
deal with the fimdamental presuppositions. I should hardly
have overcome my hesitation, however, had I not received so
much spontaneous encouragement from my hearers, particularly
from my colleagues on the stafiE of the University of St. Andrews,

vi

PREFACE

who appeared to be unanimously of the opinion that this initial
series should be published without delay.

On the other hand, the more I considered the problem as
a whole, the more alarmed I was by the disproportion between
its vastness and the incompleteness of my equipment for dealing
with it. Whilst I am fully confident and free from anxiety in
my own mind as to my main theses, I have little doubt that
the deuil of my argument, particularly in its historical sections,
presents many openings for criticism, whether by the expert
in the history of philosophy, or the historian of civilisation.
As the lay-out of my leaures is topical or systematic, and
not historical, it was unavoidable that each chapter should
somehow follow the whole course of European history, and that,
necessarily, in seven league boots. The historian is entitled to
dislike such surveys which cannot do justice to the manifold
aspects and facts of historical reality. Simplifications are neces-
sary in all sciences; one might even say that simplification is
the very essence of science. But over-simplifications may be
unjustifiable from various points of view. On some of these I
am not too sure that I shall not be found at fault.

Furthermore, I feel most vividly the disproportion between
the magnitude of each of the main topics I am dealing with and
the brevity and sketchiness of their treatment in a number of
chapters, each the length of an hour's discourse. From the
point of view of the scholar, it would have been preferable to
choose one of them only and try to treat it more or less ex-
haustively. But then the main purpose, which was exactly the
opposite — namely to show under a variety of aspects the same
fundamental dependence of our civilisation on its Christian
basis — ^would have been defeated. I therefore hope that my
readers will bear in mind this main purpose and make allowance
for the inevitable limitations resulting from it.

There are, it seems to me, two kinds of scientific conscientious-
ness, the one demanding specialisation with all its inherent
possibilities of profundity, the other calling for a venture in
synthesis with all its danger of superficiality. The European
mind of the last century has been developed so entirely and

PREFACE

vii

exclusively along the first line, that any attempt at synthesis is
looked upon as a sign of arrogance and as irresponsible dilettan-
tism. But there are times — and such a time is ours — when
synthesis must be risked, whatever the cost. Perhaps the one
who so ventures has to pay the penalty and accept without
grumbling the reproach of unscientific, premature audacity.
Still, I cannot quite suppress the hope that there may be some,
even amongst those with high standards of scientific probity,
who can see that it is not lack of respect for their standards, or
youthful impertinence, but a feeling of imperative necessity
which might prompt such an imdertaking. Having already
published not a few extensive monographs, I may be entitled to
hope that this plea will not be misunderstood.

The specific character of the topic of these lectures, which
makes necessary such a venture in synthesis, may be accepted
also as justification for the fact that the " scientific apparatus ",
which in my previous books has been rather too heavy, is this
time very slight. The field covered in this book is so vast that
complete documentation is idtogether impossible, so that it
seemed to me more honest not to attempt it.

May I conclude this preface with an expression of my deepest
gratitude to the Senate of the University of St. Andrews for the
great honour they have shown me in inviting me to give this
course of Gifford Lectures, imd for the extraordinary kindness
and friendliness with which the members of the stafE, particularly
of the Theological Faculty, received me and made me feel at
home in their delightful and historic town.

E.B.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. INTRODUCTION : THE PROBLEM OF A
CHRISTIAN CIVIUSATION . . . i

Christian civilisation in danger. The contribution of
Christianity to Western civilisation. The New Testament
seems not interested in this problem. Pre-Christian civilisa-
tions show independence of high civilisation from Christianity.
The complexity of the problem forces upon us a new kind of
approach : What is the Christian answer to some fundamental
questions underlying all civilisation ? Programme of the
lectures.

II. THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY . 15

The material and the spiritual, pantheism mediating. The
Christian idea of reality determined by the idea of creation.
Not materialism, nor the spiritual, nor pantheism. Conse-
quences for the problem of necessity and contingence, freedom
and determinism. The " perspectivity " of being, as expressed
in Psalm 139.

IIL THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH .... 30

Objectivism and subjectivism. Attempts to overcome this
alternative, in existentialism. Kierkegaard and the Christian
conception of Truth. Distinction between Truth and truths.
Truth and communion. Scientific and theological absolutism.
The fatal psychological consequences of the separation of
Truth and Love.

IV. THE PROBLEM OF TIME . . .45

East and West. Greek conception of eternity. The loss
of the Eternal in modern history. The quantification of
time, its psychological consequences. Eternity and time in
Christian thought. Time-direction, time of decision. His-
torical time. Evolution and progress. Progress, substitute
for the Eternal. Christianity and the idea of progress.

X

CONTENTS

V. THE PROBLEM OF MEANING .... 60

Totality, character of meaning. Its negation, East and
West, llie Greek equation of meaning and Logos, under-
lying modem idealism. Its weakness seen from the Christian
viewpcnnt. Formal and instrtimental character of culture or
civilisation. The Christian idea of ultimate meaning. Its
bearing on the time process. " Ambivalence " of history. The
eschatological solution of the problem.

VI. MAN IN THE UNIVERSE 75

The primitive continuxmi. Its disruption by Greek human-
ism. Christian humanism, in its synthesb widi Greek. Their
separation in Renaissance and Reformation. Copernicus and
Darwin. The dissolution of humanism in the 19th century.
Nihilism and technocracy. Man slave of his technique.
Man's place in the Universe according to the Christian idea.

VII. PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY ... 91

Primitive collectivism. The rise of individual personality.
The Christian idea of personality correlative to communion.
Love, not reason, the truly human. The decline of personalism
in modem history. Its three major causes, immanentism,
individualism, spiritualism-materialism. Its result, material-
istic collectivism. The. totalitarian state. The guilt of
Chxistianity within this development.

VIIL THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE . 106

The idea of justice a historical heritage. The Lex naturae
conception, Greek-Roman and Christian. Progressive dis-
solution of the idea of divine justice, since Grotius, by rational-
ism, individualism, and egalitarianism. Le contrat social.
Its consequences for family, economic life, and the political
order. Capitalism and Ck>mmunism twin brothers. The
Chrisdan idea of justice subordinate to Love. It combines
vrith equality uidikeness and, by it, organic unity. Its basis
in the Christian idea of creation. The false alternative and
die true synthesis.

IX. THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM .127
Different levels of freedom. Freedom as fact and as postulate.
Detemiinism and indeterminism. The radonalist equation
of freedom and independence. The Christian idea : de-
pendrace on God. The consequences of the rationalist
equation. Marxian atheism. Modem independence move-
ments : from nature and fiom authority. The crisis of

CONTENT!

HiarriaKe. Latent anarchism of the independence idea.
The Christian idea puts divine authority fint and freedom
second. Ecclesiastical authoritarianism.

X. THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY . . . 14*

Culture and creativity. Creativity gift of natiu-e, but ita
interpretation and direction lies within freedom. Early
misgivings about creativity. Prometheus, the Tower of Babel.
Positive and critical attitude of Christianity. Misunder>
standings about the role of Protestantism. Since the
Renaissance supremacy of Creativity. Cult of Genius in
Romanticism. Tendency to formalism. Claim to authmity
disintegrates civilisation into totalitarian spheres. Politick
totalitarianism the heir of the process. Theonomy integrate*
the spheres and excludes all kinds of totalitarianism.

NOTES AND REFERENCES . . . . .

a

CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION

First Series: The Foundations
I

THE PROBLEM OF A CHRISTIAN CIVIUSATION

SINCE Mr. Churchill at a historic hour spoke words which
have themselves made history about the survival of Chris-
tian civilisation, the idea of Christian civilisation and its
being endangered in the highest degree has become familiar
among the Western nations. We have become conscious of the
fact that in the course of some fifteen centuries something like a
Christian civilisation has been created, and of the other fact
that in our days this Christian dvilisatibn is at stake and its
survival is questioned. Mr. Churchill's warning has retained
its full actuality even now, after the battle of Britain has ended
in victory. For, unfortunately, the pressures to which the
foundations of this culture were exposed, have not decreased
since then, but rather increased. It is necessary to remember,
however, that this danger must have been acute for some time
in the past. Before the world had heard the name Adolf Hitler,
a solitary thinker, unknown till then, Oswald Spengler by name,
had written a startling book with the almost apocalyptic title,
Der Untergang des Abendlandes^. His ominous prophecy
of the end of Western cultural tradition, based on his analysis
of European history of the last centuries, is to be interpreted as
meaning that the time is past when spiritual forces and values
determine the face and character of the Western world. A new
epoch has begun, in which the scholar, the artist, the seer and
the saint are replaced by the soldier, the engineer and the man of
political power ; an epoch which is no more capable of producing
real culture, but merely an outward technical dvilisarion. But

H INTRODUCTION [lECT.

even Spengler was not the first to utter such dismal ideas about
the future.

Fifty years before Spengler, the great Swiss historian, Jakob
Burckhardt, who fifty years after his death is being more and
more universally considered as the greatest continental inter-
preter of the history of civilisation, had sketched a picture of the
future of the Western world which is not less terrifying.* This
picture, like that of Spengler, is dominated by the figure of the
political military dictator, gaining and sustaining his position by
means of mass-psychology and extirpating all spiritual culture by
his brutal militarism and imperialism. What then was seen by
such prophetic minds as a terrible future, has become meanwhile
an even more gloomy reality, although, thank God, until now
merely a partial reality.

The mere fact that more than half a century ago a man,
thoroughly awake to the character of his time, was able to fore-
■M the catastrophe we have experienced, indicates that the
eruption of inhumanity, lawlessness and depersonalisation,
which we have experienced during recent decades, must have
had its deep historical roots. True, this eruption of anti-spiritual
and anti-cultural forces, as they appeared first in the Bolshevist,
then in the Fascist, and finally in the National-Socialist revolu-
tion, came to the rest of the Western world as a complete surprise
and left it in utter bewilderment. Still, looking back on these
events, this feeling of complete surprise and horror is not
altogether justified in view of the fact that the spiritual evolution
during the last centuries was a slow and invisible, but none the
less indubitable preparation for this outbreak. If we ask, as
certainly many during these years have asked, how all this, this
inhumanity, this lawlessness, this collectivist depersonalisation,
was possible, the answer cannot, I think, be in doubt. The last
three centuries, seen from the spiritual point of view, represent
a history in which step by step the central and fundamental
idea of the whole Western civilisation, the idea of the dignity
of man, was undermined and weakened.' For more than a
thousand years Western culture had been based on the Chrisdan
idea that man is created in the image of God. This central

l] CHRISTIAN VALUES IN DANGER 3

Biblical idea iaduded both the eternal spiritual destiny of eveiy
individual and the destiny of mankind to foim a free com-
munion. With the Enlightenment, this idea, on which the
whole structure of Western life was rested, began to be doubted.

At first the alternative to the Christian idea was still a religious,
although no longer distinctly Christian, theism. Then, further
from the Christian foundation, there came a transcendentalism
or idealism, which still remained metaphysical, although no
longer explicitiy theistic. In the middle of the last century
this idealistic humanism was replaced by a positivist philosophy
of freedom and civilisation, which acknowledged no meta-
physical but merely natural presuppositions. It is not sur-
prising that this positivism in its turn more and more lost its
humanistic contents and turned into a naturalistic philosophy,
for which man was no more than a highly developed animal,
the cerebral animal, and this was a conception of man within
which such things as the dignity of man, the rights of man, and
personality no longer had any foundation. Benjamin Constant,
that noble Christian philosopher of freedom of the early 19th
century, has comprehended die essence of this whole process of
modem history in three words : " De la divinit^ par I'hiunanit^
k la bestiality ". The totalitarian revolutions, with their practice
of inhumanity, lawlessness and depersonalising collectivism,
were nothing but the executors of this so-called positivist philo-
sophy, which, as a matter of fact, was a latent nihilism, and
whidi, towards the end of the last and the begiiming of this
century, had become the ruling philosophy of our universities
and the dominating factor within the world-view of the educated
and the leading strata of society. The postulatory atheism of
Karl Marx and the passionate antitheism of Friedrich Nietzsche
can be considered as an immediate spiritual presupposition of
the totalitarian revolution in Bolshevism on the one hand and
National-Socialism or Fascism on the other. That is to say, the
prevalent philosophy of the Occident had become more or less
nihilistic* No wonder that from this seed that harvest sprang
up which our generation reaped with blood and tears, to use
once more Mr. Churchill's words.

4 INTRODUCTION [UECT.

This sketch of the spiritual history of the last centuries is
admittedly a forced simplification of reality, but why should it
not be? It will suffice if, notwithstanding its onesidedness, it
expresses something essential. I personally should claim that
it does more: it does not merely express something essential,
but the essential. Taken as a whole, the Western world has
moved in this direction, away from a Christian starting point
towards a naturalistic and therefore nihilistic goal, an evolu-
tion which could not but end in the totalitarian revolutions and
the formation of totalitarian states, of whidi one of the most
powerful has emerged victorious from the battle. The crisis of
Western civilisation, which became a life-and-death issue in the
fight with National-Socialism, and which is still a life-and-death
issue, primarily in view of the victorious totalitarian power in
the East, is therefore at bottom a religious crisis. Western
civilisation is, according to Mr. Churchill's word, a Christian
civilisation, whatever that may mean. Therefore the progressive
estrangement from Christianity, which characterises the history
of the last centuries and our time, must necessarily mean a
fundamental crisis for this whole civilisation. This crisis at
bottom is nothing but a consequence of the fact that the deepest
foundation of this civilisation, the Christian faith, has been
shaken in the consciousness of European and American nations,
and in some parts of this world has been more than shaken, in
fact shattered and even annihilated.

This negative thesis has as its presupposition a positive one,
which lies in the concept of a Christian civilisation, namely that
in some indefinite, but very real sense. Western civilisation was
Christian, and, in so hit as it still exists, is Christian. It is more
pleasant to give the proof or justification for this positive thesis
than that for the first negative one, although the two postulate
each other. Questionable as may be, from the point of view of
Christian faith, any bold and uncritical use of the word Chris-
tian culture, no one who knows our history can deny that the
contribution of Christianity towards the treasury of a specifically
Occidental culture has been enormous. Certainly we have to
beware of the illusion tfaat ifaere ever was a Christian Europe.

i] Christianity's contribution 5

If you understand the word Christian in its full meaning as in-
coipoiated in the New Tesument, the true disciples of Jesus
Christ, as the apostolic teaching presupposes them, were a
minority in all centuries of European history and within the
Western world at large. But it is just a manifestation of the
superhuman power and reality of Christian faith and of the New
Testament message, that they are powerful factors within the
cultural world, even where life has been only superficially
touched by them, or where they are present in very diluted and
impure manifestations.

It is this which imposes itself as a manifest fact for every one
who studies the cultural history of the West : it is not only the
Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals dominating the silhouette
of many European cities, not only the frescoes of Fra Angelico
in San Marco and of Michelangelo in the Sistine, not only
Milton's Paradise Lost, Rembrandt's engravings of Biblical
stories, Bach's passion according to Saint Matthew, which are
unthinkable without the Bible, and without the Church trans-
lating, conserving and promulgating this Bible. Our democratic
state-forms, also our public and private charitable institutions,
the colleges of English and American universities, a multitude
of the most important concepts of our psychological, philoso-
phical, juridical and cultural language are directly or indirectly
products of Christian tradition and of Christian thinking, feel-
ing and purposing. It was not for nothing that during many
centuries the Christian Church had the monopoly of education
and instruction, that the invention of the printing press prim-
arily contributed to the spreading of the Bible, that for many
cenmries the most famous institutions of higher learning were
foundations of Christian conmiunities and Churches and were
primarily destined for the promotion of Christian knowledge.
All that is easily understood if we consider that up to the 19th
century every European individual was baptised and instructed
by the Christian Church, that furthermore, at least in a super-
ficial sense, the contents of the Bible message were believed by
almost everybody and shaped their judgment of what is true
and false, g^sod and evil, desirable and undesirable. Certainly

6 INTRODUCTION [lECT.

there were always some sceptics, doubters, heretics. But they
could not manifest themselves as such. Certainly there was, pro-
bably in all ages, a large majority of indifferent and lukewarm
nominal Christians; but even they stood in an unbroken tradi-
tion of doctrine and faith, and even their conscience was formed
by the commandments of the Bible, whether they acted accord-
ing to their conscience or not. £ven towards the end of the
1 8th century, the typical thought of the Enlightenment, with its
negative or doubting attitude, was confined to a decided min-
ority within the higher ranks of society. The masses, even the
large majority of educated men and women, always thought in
the categories of Biblical Christian tradition, however diluted
or mis-shaped and distorted the Gospel may have been in this
tradition. It is therefore self-evident that in such a world of
nations civilisation was deeply imbued, determined and guided
by Christian faith, its contents, its norms, its concepts of value.
The history of civilisation, as Christian, has not yet been written.
What can be grasped of this history, however, by every one who
has any knowledge of it and who has any share in European
culture, is sufl&cient to justify that catch-word, " The Christian
civilisation of the West at least in the sense of an undeniable
fact, however different may be the interpretations of this fact.

It seems necessary to me, however, to indicate even in this
introductory survey of the field not only the facts, which may
be summarised by the phrase. Christian civilisation, but also the
deep and bewildering problem which is included in tl\is formula.
How questionable the concept of a Christian civilisation is, can
be seen from two sides, from that of Christian faith and that of
civilisation. Let me start with the first : anyone who approaches
the New Testament with the intention of getting instruction
about the relation between Christian faith or doctrine and civili-
sation or culture from the most authoritative source, cannot fail
to be astonished, bewildered and even disappointed.* Neither
the Gospels nor the letters of the apostles, neither the teaching
of Jesus himself, nor that of his disciples, seem to encourage us
in any way to investigate this relation. Jesus teaches about the
kingdom of God and its righteousness, about its coming, its

l] THE NEW TESTAMENT 7

essence and the conditions of the panaking in it, in a way which
does not seem to betray any interest in any of those things which
we include under the terms civilisation or culture. Quite the
contrary. Not only is His own mind unambiguously, not to say
onesidedly, directed towards the one goal which— however it
may be expressed — is something totally different from what we
understand by civilisation; He also requires from His disciples
the same unambiguous, uncompromising attitude and orienta-
tion. It is true that in the last century the teaching of Jesus
about the kingdom of God was often interpreted in a manner
which had greater kinship with our social and cultural problems.
But this is past. All New Testament scholars nowadays would
admit* that this 19th century interpretation, whether we like it
or not, was a falsification of the historical facts. Whether you
understand the kingdom of God more as a present reality or as
something to come, in either case it is a reality which entirely
transcends the sphere of civilisation. Its content is theloxoToc,
the ultimate and absolute, the perfect, the truly divine, distin-
guished from all human relativity. This Gospel is concerned
with man's relation to God in its innermost mystery and with
the relation to man in the most personal and intimate sense,
without any reference to cultural values and social institutions.
The teaching of this kingdom of God, however, is the be-all and
the end-all of the Gospel of Jesus ; there is no room in it for any-
thing else, for all these important but temporal and secular
things like art, education, science, sodal and political order.
How then should it be possible for anyone who takes his stan-
dards for Christian truth from this Gospel of Jesus, to attempt
anything like a Christian doctrine of civilisation?

No more encouraging is the picture which we find in the
letters of the apostles, not to speak of that understanding of
Christian life and faith whidi the last book of the Bible, the
Apocalypse of John, expresses. It is no more explicitly the
proclamation of the kingdom of God which focusses the
thoughts and feelings of Christians, but the preaching of salva-
tion, of eternal life in Jesus Christ, of the consummation of all
things in the impovola of Christ, the Gospel of forgiveness of

8 .INTRODUCTION [UECT.

sins, of redeii^>tion, of the divine judgment, of the working of
the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the faithful and in the Christian
community. It is the proclamation of Resurrection, of the
coming final judgment, of the restoration and perfection of all
things beyond their historical existence. What has all this to
do with the problems and tasks of cultural life? At any rate
they never become explicit topics of doctrine. There are a few
exceptions to this rule, a few short, although very important,
comments on the state, on marriage and family, on the relation
between parents and children, masters and slaves, but this is
about all. And if you take the last mentioned, the problem of
slavery, disappointment becomes even greater; for nothing is
said about slavery being an instimtion which contradicts the
principle of human dignity and freedom. On the contrary, we
find there an exhortation to the slaves to be satisfied with their lot
and loyally to obey their masters. Therefore the result of this
investigation seems to be entirely negative with regard to a
Christian doctrine of civilisation, whether you attribute this fact
to indifEerence, to the expectation of an imminent end of the
world, or to some other cause.

A similar result seems to be gained if you view the relation of
Christianity and civilisation from the other side, from that of
civilisation. When we survey the history of civilisation before
the entrance of Christianity into world history, we have to
admit, if we want to be fair, that the civilisation- of the pre-
Christian era does not seem to lack an essential element which
would be introduced only by Christianity. Civilisation and
culture seem to live entirely out of their own resources. Who
would deny the grandeur of the did Egyptian, Indian or Chinese
civilisations? These nations had a magnificent art, excellent
institutions of law and state, splendid systems of education and
fine culture without any knowledge of God's revelation in
Christ or of the teaching of the prophets in the Old Testament.
And what about the classical people of the highest culture,
the Greeks? Have the achievements of ancient Greece in archi-
tecture or sculpture, in epic, lyric or dramatic poetry ever and
anywhere been surpassed? Is there in any later epoch anything

l] A NEW APPROACH 9

comparable to the intensity and universality of the Greek
scientific mind? Has there ever been, to give one name only,
a man comparable to Aristotle, who could claim to have created
and mastered so many different branches of science and led
them on in that first impetus to the highest level of classical
perfection? Or we may think of those cultural values which
are less visible. Have the Greeks been surpassed by any later
generation in the development of fine manners, of forms of
spirited sociability, of that humanism which is sensitive to every
noble thing? Is not that same Athens, which produced the
Panhenon and Greek tragedy, also the cradle of the oldest
democracy of the world? Must not the philosophers of all later
generations first become students of Parmenides, Plato and
Aristotle and remain within their school all their lives, if they are
to produce something worth while? And all that, hundreds of
years before Jesus Christ I

This fact confused the first Christian theologians and led them
to put forward the hypothesis that the Greek philosophers had
learned the best of their philosophy from Moses and the
prophets of Israel by some unknown historical mediation. We
know to-day that this is not so ; we have to content ourselves with
the fact, that the highest summit of culture and civilisation
which history knows, developed without any influence of
Biblical revelation, and we shall have to keep this fact before our
eyes whenever we speak about the relation of Christianity and
civilisation-'

If now we put together these two results of our consideration,
on the one hand the intimate connection between Christianity
and civilisation in Western history, and the fundamental im-
portance of Christianity for our civilisation, and on the other,,
the mutual independence and indifference of Christianity and
civilisation as it appears from the New Testament as well as from
pre-Christian history, the problem of Christian civilisation is
intensified and deepened in a way that makes anything like a
cheap solution appear completely impossible. So much is clear
from the start, that the synthesis included in the concept of a
Christian civilisation is full of problems and that this expression

lO IKTRODUCTION [lBCT.

must be used with the greatest caution. Fro^l the very outset
we are then in the situation of Socrates : we know that we do not
know what a Christian civilisation is and can be. We know
that we do not have in our hands a ready-made programme
which has simply to be applied.

To be sure, the practical task indicated in Mr. Churchill's
words about the preservation of Christian civilisation exists
and claims supreme attention and effort. All Europe uttered a
sigh of relief when those words were spoken. But we are no
statesmen, and our task is not immediately practical but theo-
retical, although certainly not detached from the practical
interest. Therefore something is expected from us whidi cannot
be expected from a statesman. And it may be that there are
statesmen who are intensely interested in our doing our job,
which is not theirs.

Therefore I propose in these lectures to follow a path which
may appear a very bold one, and the difficulties of which are so
well known to us, that for a long while I hesitated to enter upon
it, but which seems to be a little more adequate to the depth of
the problem than most of the other more familiar ones. Let
me try to sketch it in a few words.

If by culture or civilisation — ^for the present not distinguishing
these concepts — ^we understand the sum of productions and
productive forces by which human life transcends the animal
or vital sphere of self-preservation and preservation of the
species, and if we ask by what factors such culture or civilisation
is determined, it seems that these factors can be subsumed under
three heads, in such a way that nothing essential is left out.
Civilisation is determined, first, by namral, factors like formation
of country, climate, possibilities of maintenance, within which,
as a given frame, human life has to develop. Civilisation is
determined, secondly, by the physical and spiritual equipment
of men within a given area, by their physical and spiritual forces,
their vitality, their energy and their talent. These two comr
plexes we can put toge&er as that which is outwardly and
inwardly given. Apart from these given factors, which arc
inacc^sible to human determination and freedom, there is a

l] FUNDAMENTAL Q.UESTIONS II

third, which is just as important for the formation of a certain
civilisation in its specific character, namely the spiritual pie-
suppositions of a religious and ethical nature which, not in
themselves cultural, we might call the culture-transcendent pre-
suppositions of every culture. This third factor lies within the
sphere of historical freedom, within that area which is open to
the free self-decision of man. Assuming equal natural data and
equal physical and spiritual forces, two cidtures will develop
differently if this third factor, the culture-transcendent pre-
suppositions, is different. It is this third factor which affords
the possibility for a spiritual force like Christianity to enter the
field of culture and give it a certain direction and character.
Once more assuming the natural data and the physical and
spiritual forces of two nations to be equal, the culture and civilisa-
tion within them will greatly differ, if the one is dominated by
the Christian religion and the other has another religion or an
irreligious conception of life, forming its culture-transcendent
factor. This third factor then is the one within which the
Christian faith, as distinguished from its alternatives, becomes
relevant.

Now, within this third range, there are a number of funda-
mental basic questions regarding human existence which, in any
case, must be answered and are answered, whether in a Christian
or in a non-Christian manner. Such questions are the problem
of being, of truth, of meaning, and so on. Whether one is con-
scious of them or not, these questions are present ; they must be
answered and the answer caimot be put off. These culture-
transcendent presuppositions are working factors, and in tiieir
totality they are one of the decisive elements within any given
civilisation.

It is just as false to consider these spiritual elements as the
one decisive factor — as has often been done by Christian theolo-
gians or idealistic philosophers,' as it is erroneous not to consider
tiiem at all or to underrate their importance — as has often been
done by naturalist or positivist philosophers. On one hand, it
must be affirmed that civilisation may be different in two given
areas, even if both are determined by the same spiritual factor,

12 INTRODUCTION [lBCT.

e.g. by Christianity, presupposing that the natural conditions,
and the physical forces and spiritual talents are different. On
the other hand, it must be said that civilisation may be different
in two given areas, althou^ the natural conditions, physical
forces and spiritual talents are the same. That means that each ,
of the three groups of factors is decisive for the face and content
Qf a civilisation. By civilisation we do not merely imdeistand
the narrower range of art, science and spiritual culture, but also
economical and political forms and institutions. We, therefore,
reject from the very start both a one-sided, spiritualising inter*
pretation, which takes account merely of the third factor, the
culture-transcendent presuppositions, and a one-sided natural-
istic interpretation, which takes account only of the determining
factors which are given in nature and man's natural equipment.
The justification for this a priori starting point can be given only
in the course of these lectures.

One thing, however, must be said at the start to justify our
procedure. This procedure is a bold venture, because it ignores
all traditional classifications of scientific investigation. To seek
out those fundamental questions, underlying all human exis-
tence, seems to be a task for philosophy. At any rate, up to
now, it has been the philosophers who have dealt with them.
On the other side, we are not primarily concerned with philo-
sophical answers to these queistions, but with the answers which
the Christian faith gives. And this seems to be a task for the
theologians. At the same time, our investigation will not take
place, so to say, in the empty space of thought, but within the
concrete world of history and present-day life. For we are not
merely interested in general abstract possibilities of a Christian
civilisation, but in the possibility and the specific character of
a Christian civilisation within this given historical world.
And though our procedure is theoretical, our aim is intensely
practical. Therefore I should not be surprised if what I am
trying to do here were to be judged unfavourably by theologians
as being philosophy, by philosophers as being theology, com-
bined witl^ a dilettante attempt at what in German is called
Geistesgeschichte and Gesellschaftskritik. My reply to this

l] THE CHRISTIAN ANSWERS I3

expected criticism is that I am just as much, but no more, con-
vinced of the shortcomings of this attempt as of its necessity and
imperative urgency.

The point of view from which this investigation will be made
is that of Christian faith. Agaiin, by Christian faith we do not
mean something indefinite, but the Gospel of the New Testa-
ment, as it is understood within the tradition of Reformation
theology. When therefore we ask, what is the Christian answer
to those elementary fundamental questions of human existence,
and what is the characteristic impact which this Christian
answer must have for the formation of civilisation, we mean by
Christian faith what, according to this specific tradition, the New
Testament means. But I want to make it clear from the very
start — ^impossible though it is to justify such a statement here —
that this position includes a critical attitude with regard to any
fixed dogma and an openness of mind and heart with regard
to all Christian tradition and knowledge. Reformation dieo-
logy, truly understood, is neither uncritical orthodox Biblicism
nor self-assured exclusive confessionalism. It includes, on the
contrary, both the critical and the ecumenical attitudes. I am
sorry that the limitations imposed on these leaures do not allow
me to expound and prove these assertions, which are the result
of an extended process of critical theological self-examiaation.

Let me conclude what has been said by giving a final formula-
tion of our problem. The problem of this first series of lectures
is to be stated in three questions : —

1. What answers does the Christian faith give to certain
fundamental questions of human existence which underlie any
civilisation as their culture-transcendent presuppositions?

2. How do these answers compare with other answers to
the same questions, as they occur in the course of Occidental
history?

3. What is the specific importance of the Christian answers
compared with that of the others? The following are the
questions which we have in mind or at least some of the most
important of them : —

14 INTRODUCTION

The problem of being.

The problem of truth.

The problem of time.

The problem of meaning.

Man in the wiiverse.

Personality and hwnanity.

The problem of justice.

The problem of freedom.

The problem of creativity.
In trying to answer these questions we venture to outline in
this first part a Christian doctrine of the foundations of civilisa-
tion, whilst the second part will deal with the more conoete
problems of the different areas of civilised life.

II

THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY

WHAT is ? What is real ? What is appearance ?
Perhaps it may seem strange that we start with this
question, which is certainly not the one modem man
asks. I£s question is : what is the meaning of life? Has li£e
a meaning at all? The problem o£ being is foreign to him. It
always luu been foreign to nott-|^o«^faer8; it seems to be a
problem which exists <mly for the tidiilcer. So tt ia, to a conscious
problem. The ordinary man does not ask this question; for
him it seems to be settled, he lives as if it were settled. He is
not aware of the fact that his whole life is determined by an
axiomatic conception of what is real.

That becomes clear if we ask what then is reality, God or the
world, mind or matter, the visible or the invisible, the temporal
or the eternal, the Many or the One? For the man of our time
at any rate, whatever else he may consider as real, it is beyond
question that sensible, tangible material things have the priority
as regards certainty and weight of being. A realist is a man
who tests reality by this criterion: material, sensible fact. The
prevalent standard is still the primitiTe standard of physical
condition. The most teal thing is the hard, solid material, then
follows the liquid, then the vaporous airy, transparent. The
spirimal, therefore, is a further diminution of substantial reality,
that which is farthest away from that most impressive reality of
all, the heavy, impenetrable block of iron or stone. It is from this
concepdon of reality that Ernst Haeckel defined God in conscious
blasphemy as a gaseous vertebrate. On the other hand, if a
Hindu calls Europeans materialists, he has in mind somehow
this scale of realities which most Europeans take so much as a
matter of course, that they cannot even understand that anyone

l6 THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY [lEGT.

might disagree and think differently about reality. This con-
ception of reality, however, is by no means self-evident. Those
who have been brought up within the Hindu tradition not only
think, but feel, diferently. It is not merely their theory, but
impUcit in their whole sense of life, that this material world is a
phantom, an illusion which hides and falsifies our perceptions.

This is the feeling not only of those learned Brahmins who
have studied the philosophy of the Upanishads. In the course
of hundreds or cvtn thousands of years something of this
advaita-doctrine has become a common possession and has
deeply influenced the sense of reality within the Indian world.
Reality is not the many things which we can grasp and touch;,
reality is the One which we can never perceive with our senses.
The more sensual, the more material, the less real. The true
being is that which is farthest away from the material, and
therefore is pure spirit; nay, even this assertion is still deter-
mined by that illusory world of the Many, and therefore not
adequate. The true being is that which is beyond the opposition
of mind and matter, subject and object, and therefore beyond
definition by concepts, because definition as such is a limitation.
Truly real is that indivisible One which, because indivisible, is
also indefinable — Brahma.

This idea, which is so foreign to us and sounds so incredible,
has held its own not only in India but also at certain times in
Europe, in the form of Neoplatonic philosophy and mysticism,
particularly within the so<alled Christian mediaeval world. Tlie
one true being, the ovrots ov, as Plato called it, is the divine One,
the ev Koi nSv. True reality therefore is the spiritual, not the
material world. A realist at that time was someone who affirmed
the primary reality of the ideas of the spiritual world. Matter
within that conception is, so to say, mind in a state of distension,
obscuration, dismemberment, difiEusion into what we in our time
call substance. The mediaeval thinker would have denied that
attribute or qualification; substance to him was that which is
unchangeable, that which has eternal duration, that which
caimot be divided, the One and All.

Modem physics, paradoxical as it may seem at first sight, can

n] MATTBR AND SPI&IT IJ

bring us closer to an undentanding at what mediiKval niap
thought. In modem physics, reality is not substance, but
energy, not something dead, fixed, stiff, but living power, tense,
dynamic. No longer is energy an appearance of matter, it is
matter that is an appearance of eoergy. Therefore it seems as
if at the most unexpected point, in the science of matter, a
revolution in the concept of being is in the making, a revolution
in the direction of what we call mediaeval Platonism or idealism.
Leibnitz seems to be right : reality is to be found ultimately not
in masses of matter, but in spiritual forces.

But perhaps this " either/or " is false, perhaps both extended
matter and non-extended spirit are equally real, without being as
such the ultimate reality. Since the Greek mind formed the
concept of Cosmos, a mediating view of reality has been in exist-
ence. This world, which we see with our eyes and grasp with our
hands, is somehow real. But what we ^jaap and see is not reality
itself, but one of its aspects. Consummate reality is a totality,
a world permeated by Logos, a unity of God and world, of mind
and matter, of eternity and temporality, of transpaient spirit and
opaque weight. What the Creek with his plastic artistic mind
expressed in his Cosmos idea, is something to which corresponds
in some undefined manner a feeling which is basic in many
pec^les and which we find living in the primitive mind. Nature
is permeated by divine spirimal forces, nature is always both,
divine and immaterial, sensual and material. Reality is, like our-
selves, animated body and materialised soul, divine nature and
materialised divinity. Nature-forces are divine forces and deities
are nature-forces. The one changes into the other, nay, the one
is the other. This is also a feeling of many in our own day,
expressing itself in. the art and poetry of recent times in a most
elementary way : reality is deeper than materialists think, our
senses grasp only its surface, not its depth. Or better, surface
and depth are one, the visible is the invisible and the invisible
15 the visible. Just this mystical unity is reality. " Namr hat
weder Kern noch Sdude, beides ist sie mit einem Male"
(Gk)ethe). This nature, identical with God, is reality.

The Christian understanding of reality is of a very di&rent

l8 THB PROBLEM OB BBINO OR REALITY [I.BGT.

kind, totally unlike all ibeat conceptions.* It is detennined by

the thought that God is the creator and the world His creation.
God therefore is the prinuuy reality. Whatever else we call real
is secondary, dependent reality. This opposition of the divine
and the creaturely beings seems at first hand very akin to that
Neoplatonic distinction between the One, the real being and the
Many which are not truly real. It would indeed be liard to
understand how during so many centuries Cliristian theology
and the Christian Church could have believed in the congruence
if not identity of these two concepts, if there were not at least
some similarity between these two conceptions of being. It is
possible, as scholastic theology shows, to interpret the Neopla-
tonic idea of being in such a way that it becomes reconcilable
with the Christian idea, if we assume on the other hand that the
Christian idea has already been in some way adapted to the
Neoplatonic one.^* The conmum element in both is negative :
tiiis material tangible sense world is not, as the superficial muul
believes, the true reality. Popular materialism or sensational-
ism is not reconcilable either with the Neoplatonic or with the
Christian idea. The primary reality, the aboriginal being is
God, and God is spirit.

This assertion, that God Who is spirit is the creator of all,
has the most momentous consequences for the understanding of
all existence." AU co-ordinates of the picture of reality — ^the
above and the below, the whole systein of weights, the whole
hierarchy of values — and therefore the whole conception of
culture and civilisation is determined by it. If God, the creator,
is, then that gloomy idea of fate and fatality, which lies like a
spell over the ancient as well as the modem world, loses its basis^
It is not a fate, an impersonal, abstract determining power, not a
law, not a something which is above everything that is and
happens, but He, the creator spirit, the creator person.

If we take this idea seriously, wo see at once an unbridgeable
contrast between the Christian and the Neoplatonic idea of
being. The Neoplatonic — and we may say also the idealistic
and mystical conception of being — ^is impersonal ; the Christian
idea is personal. The Neoplatonic is static; the Christian is

n] DEPENDENT BEING I9

acttre and dynamic. God's being is the being of the Lord who
pouts everything and is not posited. Sdiolastic theology
rightly uses the concept of God as actus purus, unconditional
activity or actuality or actuosity. God is therefore never
object, but always subjea; never something— it> substance — ^but
He, or rather Thou. Cod is absolutely free will, free in such a
way that the world, His creation, is at every moment conditioned
by His will. Its being is like that of a soap bubble which exists -
only because and as long as it is blown by the blower. The
moment he ceases to blow it, it collapses into nothingness. Of
course this simile falls short; the blower blows the bubble out
(rf a given liquid, God " blows " the world out of nothing, and
He Isolds it by His will through His creatio continua above the
abyss of nothingness.

With this a second aspect of this idea of being is given, that
of creaturely, dependent being. It is here that the contrast of
the Christian with the idealistic as well as the materialistic con-
cepts becomes particularly clear. For the materialist, i.e. one to
whom material, sensual being is the truly real, matter is a reality
of unquestionable, absolute solidity. True, eVen he caimot but
see that all things are changing and passing. But what changes,
he thinks, is not matter itself but merely the forms of matter.
The bearers of this unquestionable, absolute reality are the
elements, the chemical elements, the atoms. The atomic theory
of Democrims was invented in order to maintain the conception
of absolute matter In face of the obvious change in the material
world. It therefore was a profound shock to this — ^popular or
philosophical — materialism, when the latest results of physical
sdence pointed to the fact that there are no such unchangeable
material elements, that under the hands of the physicists this •
substance was transformed into mere energy and mathematical
relations. However that may be, according to Christian thought
there is no such imperishable, self-contained substance, but only
creaturely being, which exists because, and so long as, and such
as God wills it to be; being which He calls out of nothing and
which He holds above nothing. It is, however, not only the
doctrine of creation, but equally Christian eschatology, with its

20 THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY [lECT.

idea that this world at one time will be no more, which is deter-
minative for the Christian conception of creaturely dependent
being as distinguished from the being of God Himself.

This Christian idea of creaturely being is as radically difEerent
from the idealist as from the materialist conception. This
created world is no mere appearance as idealism asserts. It is
reality. God has called it to be real. Its being is not stamped
with the mark of nothingness or degeneracy. What God hts
created, that is, even if it is not independent but dependent
being. It is God Himself who g^ves it the weight of reality and
even of goodness. " And God saw every thing diat He had
made and behold it Was very good." The Neoplatonic idea
that everything which is not God is somehow degraded, de-
generate, defective being, and the old idea of Plato that matter
as such is evil, is here impossible. Its being material does not
mean that a negative value is to be attached to material being;
in its place and within its limits it is good.

There is in Biblical thought as well as in that of Aristotle or
Plotinus a conception of a hierarchy of being, represented, for
instance, in the Genesis narrative of creation. The different
levels of the material, the organic, the animal and the human are
distinguished. But the lower levels are not thought of as less
real, nor as inferior. Everything which God has created, a
so-called lower being as well as a so<alled higher one, has its full
positive value in its place. The idea— so fundamental in medi-
aeval thought — ^that the hierarchy of being is also a hierarchy of
value, has no place within the Christian concept of the created
world. We shall see later what decisive importance this differ-
ent valuation of the hierarchical structure of the world has for
» the whole problem of ethics.

The Biblical idea of God the creator and the world as His
creation, in contrast to the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic
conception of being, does not permit the idea of a continuum
in which God is the highest and matter the lowest point. God
is never to be seen in continuity with the hierarchy of the created
world. The distinction between God and creature is absolute;
the distinctions between the creatures, however, are relative.

n] NECESSITY AND CONTINOBNOB SI

There is no transition between created and the non-created
bong, God alone has non-created divine reality, and aU creation
has merely dependent, created reality. Between these two there
are no intermediates. With this conception of creator and
creation, the whole Cosmos idea and the comspcmding panthe-
istic interpretation of nature, as we find it both in antiquity and
in modem times, is exploded. The synthesis of the divine and
of nature, of the infinite and finite is dissolved, and with it the
foundation of paganism, which consists precisely in the affirma-
tion of a transition between the divine and the world. All
those conceptions of continuity between the finite and the in-
finite, the transcendent and this world, the divine and the
earthly existence, that whole hierarchy of mythical figures, that
scale reaching from the half divine hero to the highest of gods, or
that interpenetration of nature and divinity which diaracterises
the world concept of the primitive mind, as well as those sublime
ideas of the world-permeating Logos making of the world a
Cosmos, and every form of modem pantheism — all these are con-
sumed by the fire of the idea of creation. No continuity what-
ever is left but the sharp opposition : Godhead on the one hand,
the world's creatureliness on the other.

Of course this transcendence of God's being shoidd never be
confused with a transcendence of God's activity. The trans-
cendent God — that is, the God who has the monopoly of divin-
ity — ^is not separated from His creation. Distinction is not
separation. God's being is distinguished from that of the world,
but the world exists by His sustaining presence and activity.
That God whom Goethe scorns (" Was war' ein Gott, der nur von
aussen stiesse "), is not the God of Biblical revelation, but of
rationalistic deism. The God of revelation is the absolutely
vmworldly, the self-sufficient Lord, but He is the One who not
only creates the world but sustains and mles it. He is the One
by Whose will and action it is real and remains in existence, and
without Whose presence and sustaining activity it would fall
into nothingness. Every grain of sand depends on Him;
without Him it passes into nothing.

Thoefore it is only from the Christian idea of creation that

22 THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY [LBGT.

that which, in the philosophy of the Middle Ages, is called the
contingency of being can be understood.'* The distinction
between the divine and absolute, and the contingent and relative
being of created things is unknown to all the Greek philosophers.
They either oppose die One, as the truly real, to mere appear-
ance, or they think in terms of continuity, be it an upward
continuum, like Aristotle, or a downward continuum, like
Plotinus.

On the other hand, in the same degree that modem philosophy
departs from the Christian idea of God, the distance between the
contingent and the non-contingent disappears. For material-
istic thinkers there is no contingent being. For them matter
is the primary and absolute being. The atoms are uncon-
ditionally, absolutely real. Materialism attributes to the atoms
the qualities which in CSiristian theology ate attributes o£ God.
According to materialistic thought they have the a se esse, they
are eternal and independent beings. For the idealist only spirit
or mind is real. The world, however, is mere appearance.
There is no room for contingence in either case. This becomes
of special importance in the interpretation of natural law as
physics understands the term.

For the materialist, i.e. for the person whose conception of
being is determined by matter, the laws of nature are absolute,
objective entities inherent in material being. They are " die
ewigen, unwandelbaren Gesetze " by which all being, all
happening is determined. Again these namral laws play the
r61e which in Christian thought is given to the will of God.
They are the opposite of the contingent — the necessary. This
is the blind, impersonal necessity of fate, which determines,
everything. According to Laplace, a mind which at a given
moment knew the site and motion of all atoms in the Universe
would be capable of reconstructing all the past and to predict all
the future, according to the laws of mechanics." Everything
is finished before it starts, nothing new can happen. But whilst
we can easily understand that this determinism and fatalism is
the natural and necessary consequence of materialistic con-
ception, it is rather surprising to observe that this idea of &te

✓

n] FREEDOlf AND DETERMINISM 23

lurks behind all pre-Christian religion and philosophy as well.
Fate is above all the Gods of m3rthology; Moira is above Zeus
and his Pantheon. The sentences of the Noms decide the fate
of the highest Cods of Germanic religion. The highest Cods
of Indian religion are powerless with regard to Karma, they
themselves are seized by the turning of the spiiming wheel of
fate. This coming and going is the expression of a higher,
imknowable, impersonal necessity. And this is true also of all
Greek philosophy. Neither Plato's "ideas" nor Aristotle's
"entdechy" nor the divine Nous of Stoicism or of Neoplatonism
breaks through this uncaimy, gloomy determinism. Why is
this so? It is -because all being which is conceived of in im-
personal terms has the character of fate. The personal Cods of
mythology are not absolute, and the Absolute of Greek philo-
sophy is not personal. There is but one alternative to fatalism
or determinism — the idea of God being almighty, sovereign
Lcffd, Whose freedom is above everything that is, and Whose
freedom is the cause of being of everything which is not Him-
self; the idea that God, the sovereign Lord, has created the world
out of nothing and can drop it into nothingness if He so wills.
He is that God, however. Whose will is not an unfathomable
secret, but revealed Love. Whether there is a fate above every-
thing or not is the same question as whether there is an
impersonal being or a personal absolute will above everything.
It seems to make little difference, however, whether this imper-
sonal being be material or spiritual or an imknowable unity of
both. Either fate or God the Creator 1 From the Christian point
of view, then, natural laws are not absolute entities, but belong
themselves to the sphere of contingent relative being. Natural
laws themselves are created. They are, as we have it in the
German language, Ge-setze, i.e. " settings ". God set them to be.
Now this conception of setting is ambiguous or ambivalent.
And this ambiguity of divine setting — Satzung, Gesetze — is a
fundamental trait of all Christian doctrine. On the one hand,
God's settings, orders, laws, Gesetze are thought of as perma-
nent, static structures, as stable and dependable traits of the
God-created Universe. You can rely upon these orders being

24 Tap PROBLBM OF BSINO OR REALITY [lEGT.

maintained ; you can count on them ; there is no disorder and
arbitrariness in this world; it is an orderly world. But on the
other hand these settings, laws and orders, being given by God,
wants them to be. They are limitations for our freedom, not
for His. His freedom is above all settings or laws, they are not
fetters upon His action, and some day they shall be no more.
For " the frame of this world perishes The contingent is also
the transient, the perishable, the non-eternal.

Natural laws are not absolutes ; behind and above them there
is divine freedom. Natural laws are not ultimates, they are
instrumental to God's purpose. They do not determine the
purposes of God. They are organs, servants of His will, God's
purposes can never be understood in terms of law. The law in
every sense of the word has a subordinate, although a very im-
portant and indispensable function in God's economy. It has
always to be reckoned with as a means of God, but it is never to
be taken as an ultimate expression of God's will and purpose.
It is therefore questionable whether we are justified in speaking
of " eternal laws ". All laws, whether natural or moral, belong
to the created world. God's own will can never be expressed
iiltimately in terms of law, because the freedom of His love as
well as of His holiness is above them. If theology speaks of the
law of God's own being, we must take care that we are not
caught in our own words, putting abstractions above God's free
will.

The physics of to-day, in distinction from that of Laplace's
time, has made it possible agdn to hold fast the Biblical idea of
God without getting into a conflict with natural law. Without
entering the difficult and controversial consequences of the
turn theory and without making a premature use of its
startling results, we may safely say that the i8th and 19th
century idea of an absolute world-determination by natural law,
presupposing the idea of a " closed Universe " as pronounced by
Laplace, has broken down. The idea of natural law will play its
important and beneficent r61e m the future as it has done in the
past. But it has ceased to play the rdle of an absolute world-
dominant. There is room agsdn for the acknowledgment of

ii] "perspectivity" of being 25

freedom, both divine and human.^* But it is not physics, not
even post-Planck-Einstein physics, that can break the spell of
fatalism. That is done alone by the faith in God, the creator
and Lord, as He is known through Biblical revelation exclusively.

I should like to draw from the BibUcal idea of God a last
consequence of ontology, which I shall call the " perspectivity "
of being. Starting once more from the materialistic understand-
ing of being, we find there as the guiding pattern the idea of the
atom, the ultimate, material, unchangeable unit behind the
changing, material happening. This atom is, whatever its defini-
tion in terms of physics may be, whether it is the Elektron or
Proton or Neutron or what may be ; it is, irrespective of where it
is, from where you see it, or who sees it. It is, to use Kant's word,
a " Sein an sich ", or " ein an sich Seiendes This objectivism,
which philosophy for many a day has called nuye teaUsm, was
exposed as an impossibility many centuries ago. There is no
such " an sich Seiendes ", because being is always correlative
to a subject for which it is being. This critical idealism has an
easier task to^y than at the time of Berkeley or Kant. At that
time there was still in existence the insuperable contrast between
the so-called primary and secondary qualities of things. It is
quite obvious that there is something sweet only for a tongue
which tastes it and a mind which passes the judgment that it is
sweet. But that a poimd is a potmd and a metre a metre, in-
dependent of a subject, seemed to be just as clear. Now, since
Einstein, there are no " metres in themselves " left What is a
metre within one system of reference may not be a metre within
another, and that means also that the so-called primary qualities
have become relative to an observing subject. " Perspectivism "
has broken the spell of naive objectivism in the very field of
physics. With that knowledge, an old philosophical thesis of
idealism has been confirmed. Plato finally has overcome
Democritus.

None the less, this idealistic conception of being has never
been capable of convincing definitely. However compelling
its arguments, there was an aboriginal realistic instinct which
did not give way to this contention. That there is nothing

26 THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY [lECT.

independent of himself as knowing subject is what no one will
believe. To the ordinary man philosophical idealism always
appeared as a sort of semi-lunacy, at least an eccentricity. The
philosopher by his superior power of thinking could feel himself
superior to the average man and to the judgment of common
sense. But what remained a worrying fact, even for him, was
that in his practical life he was a naive realist, just as much as
his philosophical opponents. There is another observation
which cannot be omitted at this point: it seemed to be impos-
sible, at least very difficult, not to step over the limit which
separates critical and speculative idealism and thus develop a
system akin to that of Neoplatonic metaphysics with its idea of
e» Kai TiSv, the One and All, i.e. absolute spiritualism whidi
denies a reality apart from or besides that One and All.

To return to the starting point of our lecture, the Quistian
conception of God the Creator, and of the world as His creation,
is neither that of naive realism nor that of speculative idealism;
in structure as in origin it is different from both. God, Who is
spirit, is the primary original being and the world is dependent
secondary being. That is to say that the world has objective
reality, not in itself, but through the thought and will of the
Creator. It is, but it is what God thought and willed it to be
before it was. Everything which objectively is, is (i) an idea of
God, (2) a realisation of EUs will, and therefore has reality only
because it is God's idea and will. Where does our knowledge of
this being come from? The answer to this question, I think, is
this : we can know it exacdy because it is an idea. If it were not
an idea, knowledge could not penetrate it, it would be simply
irrational. Now, being objective, world-being to us is both
knowable and unknowable, rational and irrational. Our mind
finds something to know. The light of our mind is capable of
clearing up something of the objective reality, but it cannot make
it mmspaient. There always remains something opaque, dark,
resisting the perspicacity of knowledge. This is so because
created being is not merely an idea of God, but is at the same
time a setting of His will, and therefore irrational for our know-
ledge. It is factuality, that element of givenness, which is always

n] GOD THE CREATOR 2?

the limit of our knowledge and at the same time exactly that
element which produces in us the feeling of reality, transcending
our knowledge.

From the Christian point of view, then, idealism is right in
saying that there is no object without a subject which posits this
being. But it is wrong in thinking that it is our subject which
posits this reality. It is not our, but God's subject, which posits
reality. It is ours only in so far as our thinking gets a share in
God's own thought, as the psalmist says : " In Thy light shall we
see light"." On the other hand, our knowledge, however it
may extend or be extended, always comes to grief at a certain
limit, and it is precisely this Umit which is the test of reality.
It is just because our knowledge comes to grief at this dark,
opaque something which it cannot penetrate, that we say " this
is real ". But we are not capable of uniting both the light of
knowledge and the darkness of irrational givenness, except in
the one thought, that God is the creator, by Whose thought it
is " rationable ", by Whose will it is irrationally " given

I cannot but heartily agree therefore with Karl Barth, when
in his doctrine of creation he formulates that sentence, which at
first sight seems absurd, that the reality of the objective world
becomes certain to us only in the faith or belief in God the
Creator,''' that is to say, in that faith in that Creator who reveals
Himself in His own word.

It is only by drawing this consequence of a divine " perspec-
tivism" that what we said about contingence becomes convin-
cing. The world around us is God's creation, that is why it is at
once objectively real and subjectively ideal. It has not absolute
reality, but in the strictest sense of the word relative, conditioned
reality through God's positing it. It therefore takes part in the
ambiguity or ambivalence which we have just been observing
as the character of natural laws; it is real because, and in so far
as, God realises it. It ceases to be real as soon as God ceases to
reaUse it. It is possible that this insight may be the key to
certain problems of Christian theology, e.g. of eschatology,
which seem to us insoluble and which burden our theological
conscience. But there is no room here to develop these

28 THE PROBLEM OF BEING OR REALITY [lEOT.

consequences lying, as they do, beyond the horizon which we
have drawn for these lectures.

If we deal with these problems of ontology, the first imptession
will always be that they are of a very abstract nature and far
from the ordinary problems of life. I do hope, however, that I
may have impajrted to you some f eeUng that these ate questioiu
of most practicd importance, even for the ordinary man in the
street. The whole feeling of life, the whole orientation of
existence must be very different according to whether one is the
kind of man to whom material atoms are the measure of all
reality, or the kind to whom all this is a mere illusion, or the kind
who thinks in terms of his faith in the Creator and speaks to us
in the 139th Psalm :

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising..

Thou understandest my thought afar off.

Thou learchest out my path and my lying down.

And art acquainted with all my ways

For there is not a word in my tongue

But, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.

Thou hast beset me behind and before^

And laid thine hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ;

It is high, I cannot attain unto it.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit ?

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there :

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art tha«.

If I take the wings of the morning,

And dwell in the uttermost parts 6£ the sea ;

Even there shall thy hand lead me.

And thy right hand shall hold me.

I had to quote this Psalm literally and at some length because it
is such a perfect summary of what I have been trying to say.
The world around us is real; but God Himself is much more
real, and therefore much more present. The things of the world
we have at a distance ; but He is as near to us as our eye, as our
thinking mind. That God sees us, that He sees me and looks
upon me, this is the central, altdetermining assertion of the

n] THE SUPREME KBALITY 29

Biblical message. Let me put it, that dus is the " penpectivism "
of divine election. How fundamental this idea is for all our
cultural problems we shall see as soon as we have grasped the
necessary connections of this idea with that of human person-
ality. Before we can enter on this problem, however, we shall
have to deal with some others of a more abstract nature, the first
of them bdng the qiKStion of truth.

Ill

THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH

THE problem of truth is so intimately and inseparably
connected with that of being that neither cannot be dealt
with apart from the other. Therefore the old question
as to which of the two has the priority can hardly be definitely
settled.

It cannot be doubted, however, that for primitive man, as well
as for the average man of our times, the question 6i truth is no
other than that of reality. Truth and reality are one for him.
As a matter of fact, the question "What is truth ? " is first asked
only at the moment when what has hitherto been believed to be
real becomes more or less doubtful. The question of truth
stands on the borderline between naive dogmatism and ni^cent
scepticism. It is the critical question.

The spiritual state of our time is characterised by curious
paradoxes. On one hand, modem man is a naive realist — even
a dogmatist or absolutist — ^the material, sensual data being to
him unquestionable reality. If he speaks of reality in terms of
indisputable certainty, he points to the material world, to the
world of space, filled with matter. But it so happens that modem
science has shattered and riddled this conipact conception of
the world in such a way that modem man, without giving up
his naive conception of reality, has at the same time become a
sceptic. It is not the first time in the history of thought that
scepticism and materialism have gone hand in hand." Those
things which are the measure of 2JI trath for the naive dogma-
tist somehow betray man by withdrawing themselves suddenly
from him, leaving him alone with the open question whether
they exist at all. So it is not very surprising that those who at
one time hold a thoroughly materialistic view of reality should,
at another time, adopt an unqualified relativism or scepticism.

OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 3I

The phrase " Everything is relative " is spoken emphatically by
the very people for whom the atom or its elements are still the
ultimate reality. Everything is relative, they say, but at the
same time they declare as indubitable truth that the mind is
nothing but a product of cerebral processes. This combination
of gross objectivism and bottomless subjectivism represents a
synthesis of logically irreconcilable, contradictory principles of
thought, which is equally unfortunate from the point of view
of philosophical consistency and from that of ethical and
cultural value.

Apart from this last sceptical stage, it must be said that modem
spiritual evolution has been talcin g unambiguously the line of a
mote or less materialistic objectivism. This chapter of human
history could be headed — to parody Kierkegaard's phrase —
" The object is the truth I " It cannot, then, be a surprise to see
man more and more engulfed in the object, in things, in material
being, in economic life, in technics, in a one-sided, quantitative
manner of thinking, and in quantitative standards of value. In
the sphere of material being the quantum is the only difEerentia-
ting factor. Material being is merely quantitative being. An
objecti^st imderstanding of truth expresses itself, therefore, not
merely in terms of practical materialism, but also in a general
quantification of all life, as it may be seen in the craving for
records in sport, in pride in the growth of cities of millions of
inhabitants, in respect for the multi-millionaire, in admiration
for great political power. Reverence for the quantum is, so to
speak, the new version of the worship of the golden calf. It is
an inevitable consequence of the objectivist conception of truth:
The object is the truth.

That the development of the Western mind should have
followed this unfortunate line is by no means inevitable ; indeed
•one might even ask whether Immanuel Kant and his predeces-
sors and successors, whose philosophy had pointed in the opposite
direction, have lived in vain? Was it not the main tenet of
idealistic philosophy that the subject, not the object, is the
truth; that the mind, not the thing, is the true reality? Since
Plato worked out this revolutionary conception of truth,

3a THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH [lBCT.

idealism has been one of the gr^t powers in the life of Western
mankind. The question here did not concern merely the theo-
retical philosophy of knowledge, but in a vital degree, man
and mankind in its totality. Once the spell of objectivism is
broken, once man has become aware of a' reality difEerent from
that of things, the road is open for a supremely rich develop-
ment of spiritual life in all directions. Those who know
something of the enormous contribution of idealism to European
life cannot but pay it a high tribute and recall its great exponents
with deep reverence. Who can help being impressed by the
greamess and sublimity of idealistic thought, as manifest in
Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,
in Humboldt's essay on the limits of the state? Who can resist
Schiller's passion for free humanity, springing from this foun-
tain? Who would not be uplifted and feel his spiritual horizon
widened on entering the thought-world of Hegel's philosophy
of history?

And yet all this beautiful world is as if perished; all the
idealistic spirituality of the last two centuries appears now like
the flash of a meteor in the night sky. Sudi idealism has
ceased to be a spiritual power among mankind and, looking
back, we cannot help questioning whether it ever was a spiritual
power, in its own strength. It was a power, of that there is no
doubt. But was it not so only as long as it was combined with
the Christian tradition, an undertone — or, if you prefer, an
overtone — of the Christian message which ceased to sound when
the main note disappeared?

We have to ask why that was so : why this idealism, which at
the end of the i 8th and the beginning of the 19th century broke
forth so powerfully and seemed invincible, broke down so
rapidly and was completely carried away by the waves of
naturalism and materialism? Two observations impose them-
selves of which, however, only the first seems to be directly
coimected with our topic — ^the idea of truth — whilst the second
seems to belong to an entirely different range of problems. The
first observation is tiiis: that this reversal from the object to
the subject was an idea which could never become a universal

m] REAQTIONS FROM HEOBL 33

conviction in our Western world as it had become in India.
This idealistic subjectivism remained a queer, philosophical
tenet, a speciality of a tiny elite of chosen thinkers. It would
be a most instructive and fascinating study to trace in the early
writings of Karl Marx (dating from the time when he was an
enthusiastic pupil of Hegel), the complete right about turn which
led him from the absolute idealism of Hegel to a gross material-
ism, a process which we cannot fail to observe, not only in the
development of Marx, but also in that of two other pupils of
Hegel, Anselm Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss. This
all-embracing spirituality, so to say, toppled over; this excess
evaporated like a kind of spiritual intoxication, and what
remained was the depression of a barren materialism. The
way that Marx and Feuerbach went is very instructive. The
tenet, " The subject. Mind (Geist), is the truth ", changed into a
positivist anthropologism; the transcendental Ego changed into
me psychological fzct of en^irical consciousness of that man,
who, taken as a whole, is part of this world of things. Feuer-
bach's famous thesis, " All theology is anthropology meant
the complete desertion of the idealistic line. It was the
equivalent of looking upon everything metaphysical as a mere
phantasm. This is what Ifegel's idealistic philosophy led to in
his most gifted pupils.

Among these, Marx is the only one who made history. His
name stands, not without good reason, for a whole world : the
world of the proletarian man, the socialist-communist worker's
movement, and a " Weltanschauung " based on the collectivist
conception of man. Idealism ofiEered no solution for the problem
of society. It was a matter for the highly educated individual,
for an intellectual aristocracy. What the philosophical and
literary g^ts at Weimar or Jena, or around the newly created
University of Berlin, were discussing and writing did not touch
the millions of common people whom modem machinery had
thrown out of their nural, patriarchical conditions into giant
industrial cities, and there poimded together like coal-dust into
the briquets of collectivist masses. Idealism, with its theory
that mind, reason, spirit, subject is the truth, had no answer to

34 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH [lECT.

the question, "What is to happen to these people?" That is
why it did not survive.

Objectivist materialism, on the other hand, remains in some
way within the apparent reality of man. Man is an animal,
with appetite, and therefore must be fed. Man is a gregarious
animal, living in flocks with his kind, in order to face the
common foe against which the individual would be too weak.
Such is the view of man when the object is regarded as the truth.
Man, in conceiving of himself as object, conceives of himself as
an animal with the instinct for feeding and procreation and,
therefore, as a gregarious animal. Objectivism necessarily leads
to collectivism. If the object is the truth, man is merely an
individual of a species, a part of nature. It may be added,
however, that this view cannot be taken without the concomitant
sceptical thought that probably there is no truth at all. In the
collectivist society of Russia, for example, the search for truth
is out of date.

We ask next whether diere can be an understanding of truth
beyond these two half-truths of objectivism and subjectivism
and more credible than either. Can there be an understanding
of truth which, at the same time, would be a solution of the
problem of community? Within the last generation we have
seen springing up more or less spontaneously in different areas,
and moving on parallel lines, a series of attempts to tackle the
problem of truth in a new fashion, namely in such a way that
the old opposition of objectivism and subjectivism no longer
plays the dominating r61e. Perhaps it is possible to view in this
perspective the original form of pragmatism as set forth in the
writings of William James. Certainly the phenomenology of
Husserl and such philosophies as those of Max Scheler and
Martin Heidegger (both being descendants of Husserl) and,
above all, the discovery of the I-Thou -relation connected with
the names of Ebner, Buber and Grisebach, are attempts to get
beyond the subject-object opposition." All of the last-named
thinkers have undergone the influence of Soren Kierkegaard.
It was he who, more than anyone else, disclosed the unreality of
Ifegel's idealistic thoughts, pointing to the problem of existing

in] CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS OF TRUTH 35

man. But what Kierkegaard contributed to European thought
was nothing but original Christianity and the Christian under-
standing of truth.

K God is the primary reality, then the word of God is the
primary truth. Thus truth is not to be found either in the
object or in the subject, but beyond both. Truth, then, is God,
Himself in His self<ommunication to man. If this is the truth,
objectivism in its crudest form — materialism — is unmasked as
idolatry, as deification of the world. But then subjectivism too,
even in its most impressive form as absolute idealism, is idolatry
as well, namely deification of the Ego, the absolute Ego of
FicL^, which creates the non-Ego by itself; or the Atman-
principle of Indian philosophy, which is identical with Brahma,
the divine reality ; or that Nous of Greek idealism which ulti-
mately identifies the human Nous with the divine; or the
absolute principle of Reason in its difEerent forms, underlying
the various systems of newer Occidental philosophy.

If it is true that the word of God is the truth, we have first to
distinguish between Truth in the singular — which means God —
and truths in the plural — which are truths about the world. As
God is the Creator (and as such the primary reality) and the
world His creation (and as such derived, conditioned and relative
reality, having its ground in God), so there are also two kinds of
truths: God-truth and world-truths. It is one of the great
tragedies of Christian history that this distinction has not been
carried through. Mediaeval theology — and with regard to this
question Protestant orthodoxy takes the same view — considered
the source of God-truth, revelation, Holy Scripture, as being
also the truth and norm of world-knowledge. By so doing it has
fettered the legitimate, scientific use of reason and stamped the
world-picmre of Biblical antiquity with the authority of divine
revelation. Thus Copernicus had to be called a fool, and his
successor, Galileo, accused of heresy, because their teaching about
the structure of the astronomical world was irreconcilable with
the Biblical picture. For the same reason Darwin had to be
called an enemy of God because he placed man as a " zoon "
within the great connection of the animal world. The Church

36 THE PROBLEM OF ITRUTH [lEOT.

conducted a miserable crasade against the young, serious and
high-spirited scientific generation seeking truth — ^world-truth —
at all cost.

Retribution was bound to come. Science paid the Church
back, so to speak, in the same coin: in its turn it failed to dis-
tinguish between God-truth and world-truths. More and more,
science claimed the monopoly of truth-knowledge. The
posirivistic view that only scientific knowledge has a legitimate
claim to truth, and that nothing which is incapable of scientific
proof can be true — this orthodoxy of scienrific positivism,
forming an exact parallel with mediseval clerical orthodoxy — ^not
merely has its following among philosophers and scientists, but
has become a very popular and wide-spread creed. This is the
tenet: Science is the truth. The road to truth is science.
Whatever lies outside the range of science has no daim to truth.
Nothing can be aknowledged as truth that does not carry the
placet of science. Now, once this theoretical absolutisation of
science is established, its practical deification cannot but follow.
Science is held to be the salvation of the world, science will solve
the practical problems of humanity, science will play the rdle
whidi, in older times, was ascribed to God. Intoxicated by the
astoimding progress of physics, chemistry and biology, swept ofE
his feet by his successful storming of the secret of atomic energy,
modem man — ^particularly modem, scientifically trained youth
— expects from the progress of science the solution of all
problems of life.

This fantastic exaggeration of the possibilities of scientific
knowledge and its technical applications is hardly intelli^ble
to those who have become aware of the distinction between God-
truth and world-truths, and therefore see the insurmountable
limitation of scientific knowledge. But even among those who
do not hold the Christian point of view, and therefore cannot
make this distinction between God-knowledge and world-
knowledge, there are many who recognise at least one limitation
of scientific knowledge. They have come to see that science can
never speak with authority about ends, but only about means,
that it cannot find the meaning of anything, but only facts, and

mi TRUTH AND TRUTHS 37

that science can therefore do nothing within that region in
which human disorder has become most apparent — namely in
the sphere of human relationships, the sphere of ethical, social
and political problems. It has become clear — ^particularly
through the technical application of scientific discoveries in the
field of nuclear physics as, for instance, the atomic bomb — ^tfaat
we are facing a tragic discrepancy between the infinite means of
power placed at our disposal by science and its beneficial use in
human life. This fact has made many scientists and thinking
people at large realise that even science stands under the jprimacy
of ethical norms which in themselves are beyond sdentific
knowledge.

But man, when he is possessed by the idea of object-truth,
thing-credulous man, who cannot but think in terms of quantity,
whose eyes are blind to all that belongs to the sphere of quality,
cannot comprehend this situation. Combined with materialism
and with its derivative, collectivism, his faith in the saving
power of science has created something like a technocratic
religion, in which fanaticism and absolute soullessness, thing-
credulity and absolute person-blindness has created a new kind
of humanity, characterised by the most dreadful inhumanity,
of which those who still know something of spiritual and
personal culture cannot but think with horror.'* This is the
fruit of positivism, of the deification of science.

The distinction between world-knowledge and God-knowledge
— leaving to sdentific investigation the world of facts and
reserving for divine revelation the disdosure of the mystery of
God's being,** will and purpose — ^is not the only revolution which
the Christian faith produces within the realm of the concept of
truth. There is a second, just as important. What kind of a
truth is it, then, which is revealed to £uth? It is not truth in
the sense of knowing something, but in the sense of a divine-
human, personal encounter. God does not reveal this and that ,'
He does not reveal a number of truths. He reveals Himself by
communicating Himself. It is the secret of His person which
He reveals, and the secret of His person is just this, that He is
self-communicating will; that God is Love.

38 THE PROBLEM> OF TRUTH [lECT.

It is not possible to discuss fully here the depth and width of

the Christian doctrine of God and His holy merciful will. I can
only hint at the fact that the central Christian doctrine — ^the
doctrine of thei Trinity — ^has exactly this meaning, that the
mystery of God's being is communion. Not merely does He
reveal His will-to-communion with us, His creatures ; He reveals
Himself, His very essence as Love, as self<ommunicating Life.
The mystery of the Trinity is the mystery of the Love-Life in
God. This is a knowledge which stands beyond all analogies of
philosophical theology or religious conceptions of God. It has
no parallel whatever. That God is, in Himself, self-communi-
cating Love — this is the doctrine of the Bible alone. Now, this
is to say that truth is thereby identical with the good in its
highest sense — ^love, communion. The fatal breach between
theoretical and practical reason, between knowledge of truth and
ethical will, is thus healed. The solution of the problem of
ultimate truth — truth identical with ultimate absolute reality —
is at the same time the solution of the ethical and social problem.
The man who, by revelation and. faith, takes part in the divine
truth, at the same time takes part in the divine love, and is
therefore taken into communion. To be in truth is to be in the
Love of God, and to be in the Love of God is to become a loving
person, to be in communion both with God and men.

If we look back we can see that to have fixed the problem of
truth on the object-subject opposition is the disastrous error in
Western spiritual history. Ultimate, final, absolute truth is
neither the object nor the subject, neither the things nor the
mind nor reason. The either/or of objectivism and subjectivism
rather hides than reveals what is ultimately true. Whether the
knowing subject or Ego posits itself as the truth, or whether it
posits as truth its known object — " something ", in neither case is
this relation one which discloses ultimate truth. God is neither
our known object, nor is He our knowing subject ; He is the self-
communicating, absolute subject. Or, as the Biblical language
expresses it, He is the Lord.

So long as truth is thought of within the subject-object
dichotomy, it is unavoidable that either the subject or the object

m] god's word as truth 39

becomes God, the ultimate truth and reality. Now, since neither

the subject nor the object is the ultimate truth, it is inevitable
that man's mind shifts from one pole to the other in an incessant
pendulum movement. It cannot rest quietly with either of the
alternatives, since neither of them carries real conviction. This
veering from objectivism into subjectivism and back is unavoid-
able, because in the long run neither of these two answers to the
question of truth is credible. How should the object, the world
of things, be the truth, when the subject, the knowing, thinking
Ego stands above it? How should the known be more than the
knower? On the other hand, how should the subject be the
ultimate truth whilst there is a world assigned to it, whatever it
may be, in impenetrable reality? Fichte may throw his philo-
sophy of the absolute Ego into the world of the Enlightenment
as " sonnenklarer Bericht "," but it will not be long before there
is an Ernst Haeckel in the field ofiFering his gross materialism
as the solution of all the riddles of the Universe. And for
one reader whom Fichte may find there will certainly be a
hundred or even a thousand who will buy Haeckel's book as the
last word of pure scientific knowledge.

But if it is true, as faith knows it to be true, that God's word
is the truth, it means that truth — absolute, ultimate, final truth —
is not " something " that I can know as an object opposite me,
neither is it reason or spirit, my knowing mind, but it is the
divine Thou who, in His own initiative, discloses Himself to me.
True, God is over against me, yet He is no object, but spirit.
True, He is spirit, but not my spirit ; He is the absolute subject,
which I am not. In disclosing Himself to me as the absolute
spirit or Ego, as my Lord, as one who says, " I am the L ord, thy
God I ", He does not become the object of my knowledge. The
God of revelation is never my knowledge-possession. In making
Himself known to me. He makes me totally His own. If we
were to use here the categories " subject " and " object ", we
should have to say : In this truth-relation I am the object of this
subject. This is exactly what the Apostle means when he says :
To know God truly is to be known by God." And this fact —
that God knows me and reveals Himself to me ^s the one who

40 THE PROBLEM OV TKUTH {lECT.

knows me — is nothing else than what the Bible terms election,
that election which is the sovereign act of His freely given divine
Love.

This is what the Christian message calls finding the truth.
Now we can understand why the Gospel says, "I am the
truth 1 " Ultimate truth, identical with ultimate reality, is not
" something ", but God in His revelation in His word. And
this word of God is not merely a word about God, but that
word in which He encounters me as person, and that person in
which God encounters me as truth.** This is the incarnate
word in which the eternal mystery of the divine personality
discloses itself in a historical person. But, again, this disclosure
or revelation of God's truth cannot take place in an " objective "
act of knowledge, but in such a way that it discloses, at the same
' time, the solitary, egotistic human subject for the divine Love,
and thereby transforms it.

Is it then historical truth? Yes and no. Yes, for it is in
history that this revealed secret encounters me as truth. No,
for it is the eternal God who now speaks to me in this historical
revelation. Thereby the historical event ceases to be historical
and becomes living presence. It is by present inspiration that
past incarnation becomes truth to me. It is by this historical
revelation of the incarnate word that this present inspiration
can take place.

This truth, we said, is not truth which I possess, but truth
which possesses me. In this context the Bible uses an expression
which is unknosvn to philosophy, " To be in truth ". This does
not mean merely ethical truthfulness, though this ethical truth-
fulness is certainly included. But to be " in " truth means much
more : it means the same thing as to be in Christ, the same as to
be in God's Love. Where this truth is known, something
happens within the centre of the knowing subject. To know
this truth does not mean, as is the case with ordinary knowledge,
to become richer, enlarged, enhanced. 'To know this truth
means to be transformed. To be in this truth means to become
a new creature, a new kind of being. Being-in-truth means
being-in-love. It is not mere knowled^ that is ^ven here.

m] TRUTH AND GOMMUMIOM 4I

but communion. To know this truth is to become a loving

person.

Once more we look back on the history of the truth-problem.
Its unfortunate development is marked not merely by the setting
up of the object-subject-opposition, but also by the dissociation of
truth and communion, of the true and the good. From Plato
onwards we see the knowledge of truth developing in a direction
which isolates individuals instead of gathering them into com-
munion. Whether man seeks truth in the object — in things,
or in the subject — in mind or spirit, in either case knowledge of
truth does not create communion. Either it creates the isolated
spiritual individual or it creates collectivism; science and
tedmics do not really unite mankind. What modem technics
do is to create combinations of a thoroughly im[>ersonal
character. On the other hand, idealistic philosophy had an
effect similar to that of mysticism, though not to the same
degree; it makes the individual independent not only of the
world, but also of his fellow man, since it considers the develop-
ment of the spiritual personality the ultimate purpose.*'
Idealism always leads to some kind of individualism; material-
ism, on the other hand, to some kind of coUectivism. It is only
in the Christian concept of truth that truth and communion are
identical. Truth is love, because God is Ixtve.

It would be utterly false, however, to pass this critical
judgment upon our spiritual history from the viewpoint of a
selE-assured Christianity, of a pharisaical churchliness. We have
already pointed out that empirical Christianity has sadly
sinned against its own truth in not distinguishing between God-
truth and world-truths, or at least in not distinguishing them
consistently. But there is a second, even more serious failure to
be mentioned: tiie identification of revealed God-truth and
fixed dogma. In the very place where St. Paul says that knowing
God means to be known by God, he uses the famous phrase
which the dogmatising Church unfortunately never took
seriously : " We know in part " (" Unser Wissen ist Stiickwerk ").
Even that which we know by God's revelation, we know only in
part. It is absolute truth merely in so far as it is God's word;

42 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH [lECT.

formulated by us as our knowledge, it at once becomes part in
the whole weakness and imperfection of our human condition.
God's revelation identified with human dogma is the trans-
formation of God-truth into world-truth. Now this is
general formula for metaphysics : metaphysics is the extension
of the process of acquiring world-knowledge into the realm of
God-knowledge, it is God-truth in the form of world-knowledge.
Within metaphysics the absolute truth, God, is something
knowable, a part of man's own realm of knowing. I think it is
this which Kant had in mind when attacking all metaphysical
theology. But we are not concerned here with the philo-
sophical criticism of metaphysics; whatever metaphysics may
be for the philosopher, from the Christian point of view it is a
grave misimderstanding. Even more, it is a kind of idolatry,
identifying God with the product of our own thought.

It is exactly this which underlies the dogmatism of the
Christian Church, t.e. the false identification of God's revelation
and our formulation of it which takes place as soon as one
forgets the basic truth that " we know in part ". The Church
dogma, taken as absolute, springs from the innate tendency of
man to absolutise his own knowledge of truth. Like all dogma-
tism, and more than any other, it has produced an obduracy of
mind and heart. It has fettered necessary spiritual freedom and
anathematised critical examination, thus evoking in reaction a
hostile attitude towards the teaching of the Church, which has
taken the form either of a rationalist dogmatism or of a
relativist scepticism.

But there were even graver consequences. Church dogmatism
has made almost impossible the truly Christian understanding
of truth. For centuries, inside and outside the Church, it pro-
duced and sustained the false conception that faith or belief
means to accept certain revealed trudis taught by the Church
or the Bible, which have to be accepted on their authority. This
erroneous conception of faith as a heteronomous, authoritarian
belief — as submission to the authority of the teaching Church
or to that of the Bible — ^has become an almost insuperable hind-
rance to true faith-knowledge. Where this false conception of

in] TRUTH AND LOVE 43

faith pievailft— where faith or belief is understood as an
acceptance of doctrines instead of a divine-human encounter —
it is no longer the unity of truth and communion, and therefore
no longer the faith which cannot but work itself out in love.
This orthodox dogmatism has separated faith and love, and
produced a kind of believer in whose life love is not the char-
acteristic feature. For this reason the Church bears a large part
of the responsibility for the misunderstanding of the truth-
problem which so unfortunately characterises our history.

To sum up, the genuinely Christian understanding of truth is
such that it allows all necessary freedom for scientific investi-
gation of the world and at the same time guards against the
misunderstanding that science holds the key to the mystery of
human existence and is the source and norm for ultimate truth.
The divine knowledge given to faith does not merely fulfil the
highest endeavour after truth, but at the same time brings man
into communion with Cod and man. Whilst in ancient philo-
sophy the unity of truth and goodness was dimly felt or aspired
after but not known,^' and whilst in modem times the search
for truth and the search for community have led in diverging
directions, this unity of truth and communion comes through
the revelation of God, Who is the ground of all reality and the
source of all good. This genuine Christian understanding,
however, sits in judgment not only upon modem spiritual
development, leading consciously and unambiguously away
from Christianity, but also upon empirical Christendom itself,
which has hidden that tme understanding by its dogmatism.
The great promise of St. John's Gospel, that truth shall make
us free, was not fulfilled by traditional Christianity, and still
less by modem intellectualist conceptions of tmth. Neither
science nor the Christian dogma has proved to be the liberating
power. Science stands bewildered and helpless before the
ethical and social chaos of our time. And the dogmatism of the
Christian Church has discredited the truth of revelation and
hidden it from those who seek a real solution of this chaos. But
wherever the genuine, original truth of revelation in its New
Testament purity and depth is grasped by, or rather gets hold of,

44 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH

man, there forces of moral renewal and a spirit of communion
aie (treated, which alone are capable of reuniting that self-
dissolving human family and of solving the problems of society.
It is there, also, that the old problem of science and belief, faith
and knowledge, is seen as a misunderstanding and ceases to
exist, because it is possible to give to science what belongs to
science, and to revelation what belongs to revelation, and still see
their unity in the One who has created this world different from
Himself, and has reserved to Himself the revelation of the
mystery of His own being and mil.

IV

THE PROBLEM OF TIME

THE relation of man to time is an essential factor deter-
mining the character of existence for the individual, as
well as for whole epochs and difiEerent civilisations. Every-
one knows that the haste and rush which characterise our life are
something typically modem, and probably a symptom of a
deep-seated disease. But there are few who take account of the
basic elements which determine man's relation to time. It is
not because modem man has watches and time-saving
machinery that his life shows an ever-increasing speed ; modem
man has watches and time-saving machinery because he has a
certain relation to time, which expresses itself most crudely in
that often heard phrase: I don't have time I Now that even
children in the nursery use this phrase, we can no longer post-
pone investigating the roots of the apparent time-disease of the
present world.

All who have travelled in the East with open eyes ^d an
impressionable mind are at one in finding an immense contrast
between the quiet of the Orient and the unrest of the West.
Although we cannot deny that certain external elements of
technical civilisation contribute towards this striking differ-
ence, its real cause does not lie on this superficial level, but in a
different rcilation to time. The Orient has a conception of time
entirely di&rent from that of the West, and this difference
belongs to the religious and metaphysical sphere. In all
Oriental philosophy and religion, time is something irrelevant
and illiisory compared with eternity, although the individual
interpretations of this basic conception may differ. Reality is
beyond and above the time-process. Change means imperfection.
Just as a man looking for change does so because he is not
satisfied with what he has, so nothing that is subject te change

46 THE PROBLEM OF TIME [lECT.

can be looked upon as true being. That which exists must have

duration, persistence ; it must be changeless, being satisfied with
itself. It is not possessed by an urge to get what it does not ,
have, to become what it is not yet. True being is eternal. This
idea is common to the whole Eastern world, however differently
this eternal being may be interpreted. The radical expression
of this idea is again found in India. The world of change is
unreal. Reality is — as we heard in a previous lecture — the One
and All which cannot change, and therefore has no relation to
time. It is timeless, motionless, self-satisfied eternity; therefore
it is the deepest desire of the Indian thinker to enter into or to
share in that motionless eternal being, in Nirvana.

This conception, however, was not foreign to ancient Greece.
We find it in its most daring expression in the system of Par-
menides, and in a less extreme form in Plato's idealism. The
ovTws ov, the true being of the world of ideas, is distinguished
from mere appearance or the half-reality of the world of sensa-
tions by this very fact, that it is timeless eternity beyond aU
change. This world of sensible experience, however, is taken
up with an incessant stream of change and becoming. There is
a clear<ut opposition between eternity and the temporal world.
Eternity is the negation of time : time is the negation of eternity.
How this time-world came into being, and what kind of being
it has, is a question which can hardly be answered satisfactorily
from Plato's presuppositions. On the one hand, Plato wants to
get away from the blunt negation of the temporal world as
represented by Parmenides ; on the other hand, he does not seem
to succeed in giving the world of time and becoming its proper
place. Neoplatonism which, as we have already seen, is so im-
portant for the formation of the mediaeval world, tried to solve
the problem by the concept of emanation, emanation meaning
at the same time a kind of degeneration. By a process of flowing
out or going down, a whole hierarchy of half-realities is estab-
lished between the eternal, true being and absolute nothingness.
In this hierarchy the distance of each step from the eternal is
also its distance from true being or the measure of its approach
to nothingness. Thus a continuum reaching from eternal true

IV] (QUANTIFICATION OF TIME 47

being to zero is conceived, which forms a parallel to the modem
concept of evolution but runs in the opposite direction.

Modem man's understanding of time is quite different from
this conception. To him the temporal is the real. Whether
there is anything eternal is uncertain; but that the things in
time are, is beyond question. But what is his concept of time?
As it is quantity which determines his concept of reality, time
also is a quantum — measurable time, time which consists of
time-units, time-atoms. The second hand of the watch is the
symbol of modem man's understanding of time. He looks for
reality in the present moment, but the present moment is the
smallest indivisible element or fraction of time. Life, then,
cannot be but the sum or addition of such fractional time-
entities, of time-atoms. This quantified physical time has
completely lost its distinctiveness from space; it has become a
fourth dimension of space.'* Quantified time is spatialised time.
Time dwindles away into space. It has no quality of its own.
It is interchangeable with the dimensions of space, and is there-
fore always about to pass into zero.

It is this conception — not the watch or the telephone or the
aeroplane — ^which is the cause of man's not having time. Time
was lost to him metaphysically long before he had overcome it
technically. The exact time-signal on the radio, which every
decent citizen notes in order to set his watch correct to the
second, the wrist watch, which at any moment shows him the
exact time — all these devices have been invented because man
wants them, because time vanishes under his fingers, because he
does not have time any longer. We have reached here the
opposite pole from the Oriental view. Reality is pulverised
temporality. It is in vain that Faust wishes to see that moment
to which he can say : " Verweile doch, Du bist so schon I " It is
in vain that Nietzsche exclaims in a superb poem : " Denn alle
Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit ". If once you have
declared your option for the moment, the fate of your reality as
radical temporality is determined, and radical temporality is
vanishing time. Hme dwindles away, constantly approaching
zero.

48 THE PROBLEM OF TIME [lECT.

It is for this reason that modem man wants to snatch as much
of this time as possible, to get as much " into his time " as he
can. He begins, so to say, a race with time, and in this race
man is inevitably the loser, because it is the last moment which
decides, and the last moment is death. Man races death, but
death wins. Over the whole of life there looms this certainty
of a lost race with death. But no one likes to face it. The
thought of it is avoided, because man's chances are so absolutely
hopeless. Modem man puts out of sight as well as he can all
reminders of death ; he does not want to hear of it, because the
thought reminds him of his being the loser. All the same, the
remembrance of death stands behind him with its whip like a
slave-driver and urges him on. This — and this — and this I must
have, cries man, before it is too late, before the door closes for
ever. It is the panic of the closed door. This panic explains
many of the features which are typical of modem life : ' man's
hasty enjoyment, his all-dominating craving for security, to
which finally he sacrifices freedom and his soul.

The Christian understanding of time and its relation to eter-
nity stands midway between, but also above and beyond, the
opposing views of East and West. At first sight it seems much
more similar to the Eastem than to the Western concept, its
main thesis being that God is eternal, and th&t therefore true
reality is eternity. Is not the Gospel the promise of eternal
life? Is it not said that God is unchangeable? " With Him
there can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by
turning."" He is the same yesterday, to-day and in eternity.
" For a thousand years iii Thy sight are but as yesterday, when
it is past." The time-process in its totality, from beginning to
end, is present in Him. For Him there is no surprise. Every-
thing that happens does so according to His etemal decree.
God is etemal.

But the relation of this etemal God to temporal being and
becoming is totally different from what it is in Indian thought
or in the systems of Parmenides, Plato or the Neoplatonists.
God creates the time. He gives rime. As He, the Almighty,
gives man room for his freedom, so He creates time for him, for

IV] TIME AND ETERNITY 49

his becoming and for his free action. Temporality is not an
approach to nothingness any more than the created world is
unreal. God has created time together with the world, He has
set a begiiming to time and will set an end of time. He gives
every man his time, with a beginning and an end to his temporal
existence, but the end of time and the beginning are not the
same. The time-process does not come back to its beginning.
Between these two points, the start and the finish, sotnething
happens, which even for God is real and significant. There is
history, an individual and a universal human history, in which
Cod is infinitely interested. He is so intensely concerned with
this history that He not only looks down on the scene of human
life like an interested spectator, but He Himself intervenes in it.
Even more, at a certain point in this time-process, He Himself
enters the scenery of temporal life; He, the eternal, appears in
the shape of a historical person and, as such, performs, once and
for all, the decisive act of all history. The incarnation of the
word of God is at once the insertion into time of the eternal
God: "When the fulness of time came, God sent forth His
son "." And in Him He revealed unto us the eternal secret of
His will."

This event charges the time of man's history with an extreme
tension.** It is the time of expectation of the end, that end
which is not the closed door, but the open door. It is the
expectation of fulfilment. Time conceived in that fashion is the
time of decision and probation. It is that time in which the
eternal fete of the individual is decided. Therefore this sense
of time is as remote from Oriental indifference to the temporal
as from that time-panic of the modem Westerner. It is of the
utmost significance, because it is within time that everything is
decided for us, and every moment is a moment of decision. In
every moment we have to keep faith; the servants must be awake
all the time, for they do not know the day and* the hour when the
Lord comes ; they do know, however, that if the Lord finds them
sleeping they are lost, and that it will be said to them, as to those
foolish virgins battering in vain on the closed door of the
wedding-feast, " 1 know you not ".**

50 THE PROBLEM OF TIME [UECT.

All the same, in spite of the tremendous tension and the
weight of decision involved, this temporality is not the ultimate
reality; it is an intermezzo between divine election in the begin-
ning and eternal perfection beyond time, beyond the limit of
death, beyond this historical movement.

These two aspects of time enable us to understand the
Christian concept of history. As has often been observed,
neither in Oriental nor in classical Greek thought does the prob-
lem of history play any r61e. For the Oriental as well as for the
Greek — and, we may say, for all humanity outside of Biblical
revelation — the image of temporal happening is that of the
circle. Temporality, as far as it has any reality and any signi-
ficance, is a circular movement, always returning on itself. It
is the same movement which we observe in nature: day and
night, summer and winter, birth and death in perpetual rotation.
This movement, then, has no climax; it leads nowhere. It is
therefore not worth while making it a problem of thought. This
is why Greek philosophy, to which everything else has become
a problem, never made history an object of philosophic reflection.

The theme of history as a topic of thought is Judeo-Christian,
brought into our consciousness by the Old Testament prophets
and by the New Testament Gospel. Here history is no circular
movement. History is full of new things, because God works
in it and reveals Himself in it. The historical time-process leads
somewhere. The line of time is no longer a circle, but a straight
line, with a beginning, a middle and an end. This is so because
— ^if I may use a simile — God Himself has entered this circular
time at a certain point, and with His whole weight of eternity
has stretched out this time-circle and given the time-line a begin-
ning and an end, and so a direction. By this incarnation or
" intemporation " of the word of God, time has been charged
with an immense intensity. It has become, as we have said, the
time of waiting, of decision and probation. Thus history has
become interesting as a theme even for the thinker. It is now
worth while for a thinker of the highest calibre, like St.
Augustine, to write his De Civitate Dei as a kind of Christian
philosophy of history, in fact the first philosophy of history ever
written.**

nr] THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION 5I

We have been speaking of the tension of temporality. Com-
paring, however, the Christian existence with that of the
panic-stricken modem man, we could also speak of a removal of
tension. " For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life . . .
nor things present, nor things to come . , . shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord."" " For I reckon that the sufiEerings of this present time
are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be
levealed in us."" Christian man, through his faith in Christ
Jesus, is time-superior, time-exempt; he lives already in the
coming eternity. Important as earthly events may be in his life
and that of other men, the all-important, the true decision has
already been made in Christ, and the believer's life consists only
in living on the basis of this earlier decision. This is what is
meant by " Living by faith ",

The Christian conception of time, then, permits and even
obliges us to partake in temporal happenings with the utmost
intensity — ^the picmre presented by the New Testament being
usually that of an athlete on the race-course, spending his last
energy to reach the goal — and at the same time to be free from
the haste and over-excitement created by the panic of the closed
door. Those who live in faith are seriously intent on something
going forward on this earth, something being bettered, so that
the will of the Creator may be more fully expressed in His
creation than it is now, under the domination of evil. But at
the same time the life-feeling of the Christian is not dependent
on whether or not this earthly goal is reached. He knows that
whatever he can do for the realisation of God's will is at best
something relative. He knows that whatever goes on within
this temporality is encircled by the limits of death and fragility.
And yet this insight into the insurmountable barrier does not
make him resigned. His true, ultimate hope is not based on
what can be achieved within temporal history, but upon that
realisation of the divine purpose, which is neither dependent on
man's action, nor happens within time, but sets an end tb the
temporal world, and which is not a goal, but the goal, the ulti-
mate TcAor, the perfection of all things, which God gives and
effects in bringing about life ete|iial.

52 THE PROBLEM OF TIME [LEOT.

The Qiristian understanding of history and its goal is sharply
distinct from the idea of progress and evolution, which is char-
acteristic of our era. Such a concept of universal evolution is
unknown not only in the Eastern world but also in the West, so
far as regards antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the period from
the Reformation right up to the i8th century. Where the
totality of temporal reality is interpreted by the symbol of a
circle, there is no room for the idea of universal progress. Neither
Heraclitus' Travra ptZ, nor Aristotle's entelechy means anything
like a directed time-process. The stream of happenings of which
Heraclitus speaks is a movement without direction and goal, an
eternal fluctuation comparable to the moving sea. But neither
does Aristotle's entelechial movement have any reference to
history. It is an eternal movement without beginning or end.
No Greek thinker ever conceived the Cosmos in such a way that
it represents a movement in time directed towards a goal, so that
the later generations of time are somehow better ofE than the
previous ones. If there is anything like a universal direction in
this time-process, it is a movement downwards rather than
upwards, a decline or degeneration rather than an evolution or
progress. Such is the mythical concept of the successive world-
epochs, as we find it in Hesiod, and a similar consequence might
be drawn from Neoplatonic metaphysics.

The idea of evolution is, however, also entirely unknown
within early Christianity. It is true that the basic conception
of the coming kingdom of God includes the idea of a goal of
history. It is also true that within this historical, temporal
world a hidden germ of this kingdom of God is growing,
intensively and extensively. Still, the idea of universal progress
is impossible within this Christian conception because, alongside
this growth of the kingdom, there is the concurrent growth of
the evil powers and their influence within this temporal world.
The tares are growing together with the wheat." The opposition
to the kingdom is growing at the same rate as the kingdom
itself, so that the later generations are in no way better off than
the earlier ones. On the contrary — ^it is in the last days that the
conflict between good and evil forces reaches a climax. The goal

nr] EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 53

of history is reached not by an immanent growth or progress,

but by a revolutionary diange of the humam situation at the end
of history, brought about not by man's action, but by divine
intervention — an intervention similar to that of incarnation,
namely the mipovaia, the advent of the Lord, the resurrection of
the dead, the coming of the eternal world. That this end of
human history is utterly distinct from continuity and immanent
growth is most clearly expressed in the idea of the dies irae, the
day of the Last Judgment, whidi puts an end to human history.
The framework of this Universe is broken, death — ^"the last
enemy ", and the diaracteristic feature of the temporal world —
is overcome and annihilated, and the eternal world is established.
There is no room in this picture for the idea of universal progress
and evolution.

On the other hand, the popular belief that the idea of evolu-
tion and progress was first worked out within natural science,
and thence affected the conception of history, is false. The
reverse is true : the idea has been transplanted from an evolu-
tionary conception of history into natural science. Lamarck
and Darwin are not the pioneers but the heirs of this modem
idea. The real pioneers are men like Rousseau, Lessing,
Herder, Hegel. The idea of progress and evolution is a child of
the optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Its basis is an optimistic evaluation of human namre and, as
its negative consequence, the repudiation of the fundamental
Christian ideas of the Fall and of original sin. Human nature
as such is good; at least, it is raw material fit to be shaped into
something good, into true humanity. This anthropology seems
to be based not on axiomatic speculation but on observation, on
facts. History does begin with primitive man; he is the raw
material out of which perfect humanity can be shaped. He it is
whose mental capacities are not yet developed, whose cultural
life has not yet begun. Civilisation and culture are acquired
only in the course of a process extending through thousands of
years, growing from generation to generation. It is this
undeniable fact of the continuous growth of the benefits of
civilisation, and of a progressive use of man's mental capacities.

54 THE PROBLEM OF TIME [lECT.

which is the backbone of the iSth-centiuy idea of the universal
progress of humanity.

This idea, however, is possible only by using a very dubious
equation, i.e. the supposition that the more developed human
life is in the cultural sense, the more human or good it is in the
ethical sense ; that moral evil is therefore only the primitive, the
not-yet-developed; and that the good, the truly human is
identical with the no-longer-primitive, the developed. Or — to
express the same from the negative angle — the idea of universal
progress is made possible only by denying the Christian con-
ception of evil as sin, i.e. egoistic self-will and self-affirmation
contradicting and opposing the will of God and the moral law.
According to the Christian conception, there is continuity
between the primitive state of mind and the developed one, but
betw^n the morally good and the morally evil there is no con-
tinuity but merely contradiction. Moral evil, understood as
sin, is not that which is not yet good, but that which is no longer
good. Sin is not undeveloped good, but spoilt and perverted
good. It is not something which is not yet there, but it is a
present reality of a negative character, the antagonism of men's
will to the will of God. It is therefore only by substituting for
the contradiction, for the Yes-and-No relation, the merely
relative contrast of less and more, that the idea of universal
progress is possible. As a consequence, the Christian idea of
redemption is replaced by the idea of cultural development.
The more man is trained to use his mental faculties, the more
he gains power over the outside world and over his own forces,
the more human he becomes, so the more evil disappears. This
is the basic illusion of this favourite and most influential idea
of modern man.

But where did 18th-century philosophy get the idea of a goal
towards which history moves — an idea which was utterly foreign
to rational philosophy in pre-Christian times? The answer, I
think, is obvious, and the proof for it can easily be found in
thinkers like Lessing and Herder. The idea of a universal goal
of history is a Christian heritage, although completely trans-
formed in context. Whilst, in the Christian view of historj.

nr] IDEALISTIC PROGRESSIVISM 55

this goal is transcendent in character, namely the world of resur-
rection and eternal life, it has now become immanent, being
here identij&ed with an imaginary terminus of the^ movement
which leads from the primitive to civilised cultural life. In this
fashion was formed that inspiring — ^not to say intoxicating —
idea of idealistic progressivism which has taken hold of the best
minds since the middle of the i8th century. It is the bastard
offspring of an optimistic anthropology and Christian eschato-
logy. Humanity as a whole is involved in a unique process,
leading upwards from primitive beginnings, from a more or less
animal start, to the loftiest peaks of true spiritual humanity, a
process which is far from being finished, in which our genera-
tion is involved ; one which perhaps will never be finished, but
the end of which we are steadily approaching."

It is this idea of evolution which modem natural science
inherited and which it had only to supplement, to support and
substantiate by its own means. From this idealistic conception
Lamarck, Lyell and Darwin drew their ideas of an all-embracing
evolution of life on this globe. The scientific evolutionism of
the later 19th century is composed of two elements : this ideal-
istic idea of progress, combined with certain observations in the
field of biology. What i8di<entury philosophy had worked
out in the limited field of human history was now brought into
a much larger context. The history of the forms of organic life
on our planet seemed to corroborate such an optimistic idea of a
universal development. Was it not a fact that everywhere the
primitive, undifferentiated forms precede the differentiated, the
higher forms or organisation? Therefore it would appear that
life is moving onward to unknown heights. Again, it was not
seen that this naturalistic form of evolutionism is based on an
unjustified identification, namely that the more "differentiated"
in the biological sense is the " higher " in the human or spiritual
sense.

But, once taken for granted, this idea of evolution seemed to
give a new value to temporal becoming, which in the thought of
die ancient world was a merely negative concept. In the course
of becoming the perfect seems to emerge gradually/* The

56 THE PKOBLKM OF TIME [lECT.

splendour of the idea of perfection, which in sndent philosophy
had been identified with the transcendent and timeless world of
ideas, and which in Christian thought had been reserved for the
divine, supernatural sphere, then seemed to have shifted over to
the historical world and to natural forces. From then on it
seemed to be possible to believe in perfection on the basis of
purely secular, natural, even material, principles. Since the idea
of progress had come into the wide field of natural science, it
seemed to have become independent of all metaphysical and
religious presuppositions. It had become an instrument of
natural explanation.

This was certainly not the conception of Rousseau, Lessing,
Herder and Hegel. When they were speaking of evolution,
they meant something which was at the same time immanent
and transcendent, natural and divine. For them evolution was
not merely a causal process of differentiation, but in the literal
sense an evolution, t.«. the disclosure of something divine hidden
in the natural. To them the time-process was at once both
natural and supernatural and certainly, in any case, teleological
and spiritual, not merely causd and material. But with
Darwin's theory of selection, teleology seemed to be superseded.
The one principle of causality was student not only to explain
a process as such, but to explain a progress, i.e. a process with a
certain definite direction. Now it was possible to have finality
without, a prindple of finality, to have teleology on the basis of
causality, to have a direction of history by merely natural forces
— in a word, automatic progress.

This new phenomenon — ^the idea of evolution and progress —
is not only important from the point of view of becoming, but
also as an element in that feature which we found so character-
istic of our age, the temporalisation of existence. By means of
the idea of evolution it seemed possible to repudiate eternity and
still keep all those values which in previous times had been con-
nected with the eternal. The eternal 'is no more necessary to
g^ve meaning to life. Temporal life, interpreted in terms of
evolution, had meaning, direction and finality in itself. For
that reason evolutionism became one of the most potent factors

IV] CHRISTIANITY AND FROOKBSS 57

of temporalisadon, of radical repudiation of the idea of eternity
within the conception of human existence.

But I am constrained to offer some observations which lead to
a different conclusion: —

1. Even granted that the idea of universal progress is correct —
which we never should admit — it is undeniable that the result
of this progress means very little to the individual. One has
to thiiik in generations, in centuries. This means that the
interest moves away from the personal to the collective. The
individual and his fate, his future, become irrelevant. It is
only the totality which counts; or rather it is an abstract
humanity forming, so to say, the subject of this evolution.

2. Therefore this present existence has no meaning and value of
its own. It is merely a point of transition, a rung on the
ladder which leads upward. Its own value — ^if you ask for
such estimate — ^must be left indefinite, and is therefore open
to question

3. But these factors lead in the direction which we have been
calling the dwindling-away of time. The real, existing man
appears to himself like a snapshot, a fraction of a large reel of
film — a picture which, taken by itself, is as meaningless as a
single frame cut from a movie strip and as absurd as a slow
motion film. So this idea of evolution must — once its first
intoxicating effect is over — ^take the whole substance away
from life. It means that life is, as it were, eaten away from
the inside.

Needless to say, this idea of a universal progress of such a
natural upward movement is irtecontilable with Christian faith.
This does not mean that the Christian cannot acknowledge
certain aspects of the evolutionary theory of natural science.
From the point of view of Christianity, there is no reason to
deny that life on earth has a long history, spanning millions of
years; that it has passed through many transformations; that
the origins of mankind lie far back in prehistoric, primitive
beginnings, presumably in animal forms. Within the limits
which conscientious scientists have set for themselves, die
evolutionist theory is not in conflict with Christian faith.

58 THE PROBLEM OF TIME [lECT.

Two elements of this evolutionist thought, however, must be

unconditionally rejected from the Christian point of view:
first, the identification of moral evil or sin with the primitive;
and, second, the assumption that the development of human
intelligence, technical skill and cultural enrichment mean ist
themselves a progress in the sense of the truly human. The
Christian conception of man includes the belief that the higher
differentiation of intellectual powers, as well as the increase of
the means of civilisation, is most ambiguous with regard to
goodness and to the truly human. It can mean an increase of
moral evil, of destructive inhumanity, just as much as the
opposite. Civilised man, with the highest scientific and technical
training, and commanding the accumulated wealth of ages of
civilised life, may still be morally bad, even devilish, and if he is,
he is so much the more dangerous. The highly developed
human mind and the highly developed human civilisation may
come to a point where they are capable of destroying all gains
and goods in one frantic moment of diabolical madness.

This is why the modem identification of the idea of progress
with the Biblical message of the kingdom of God is a demon-
strable' error which has most fatal effects. The idea of pro-
gress means a movement from here to there, from below to
above, reaching more or less steadily towards a point in the far
futiue, in which perfection is conceived of as materialised. The
Christian message of the coming kingdom, however, means just
the opposite movement — a movement coming down from above
to below, from " heaven ", i.e. from the transcendent, to earth.
Where it reaches the historical plane, it breaks the framework
of this temporal, earthly existence. That is what is meant by
resurrection, parousia, eternal life. The New Testament knows
nothing whatever of a kingdom of God which develops accord-
ing to the idea of progress, slowly, immanently, from below
upward. This so-called kingdom of God is simply an invention
of the 19th century, read into the Btble, but not to be found
there. It is a mixture of the New Testament message and
modem evolutionism, out of which nothing good can come, but
only iUusion, disiUusionment and final despair.

IV] VALUE OF HISTORICAL PROCESS 59

One last question has not yet been touched : From the point
of view of Christian faith and hope, what is the result and value
of the historical process? This question cannot be answered by
a simple scheme. The Christian expectation of the coming
kingdom first of all places everything historical under the
radical negation of the divine judgment. All human history
is flesh, taking the word in its Biblical sense. Therefore it is
transient. From the texture of history the two dark threads of
sin and death cannot be eliminated anywhere, from the begin-
ning to the end. They belong to the picture of historic life.
History in its process already performs part of this judgment
upon its own creations. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Welt-
geriche." History devours its own children ; whatever it brings
forth passes away some day. This, however, is only one side of
the picture. There is also continuity, there is tradition, there is
historical heritage. Not every epoch begins anew from nothing.
We all live from the stored-up wealth of previous ages. Eternal
life is not only the negation, but also the fulfilment of this
earthly life. It is not only a new world, but also the perfection
of this world. Even our body, which seems to be particularly
perishable and unfit to inherit the eternal, will be not simply
destroyed, but transformed into a completely obedient organ
and expression of the life of the spirit.

If, however, we ask whether there is any part of this reality,
any element of our. present experience, which as such shall be
deemed worthy to enter into the perfect eternal existence, the
answer must be. Yes indeed, there is one element which, whilst
being an experience within the Christian life, will also be the
element of eternal life, namely love in the New Testament sense
of Agape. Neither the State, nor culture avilisation, nor
even faith and hope, are that element which remains in eternity,
but love alone. For God Himself is Love. That is why it is
said that whilst all other things pass away, including faith,
knowledge, language and hope, love alone renuiins, and this love
is the principle of true humanity.

V

THE PROBLEM OF MEANING

IF we ask what is the most urgent and burning problem en-
gaging Western man in our time, the answer cannot be in
doubt. What disquiets and torments him most is the pro-
blem of the meaning of life. What is the meaning of human
existence? Has it any meaning at all? The terrific convulsions
of this generation, which have laid open to question not only the
survival of human civilisation but also the existence of the
human race itself, together with the earthquake in the spiritual
foundations of life, give this question an urgency and a radical
character which it never had before nor ever could have had.
But beyond this, the point has already been reached where man
is so much inclined to doubt the meaning of life that he does not
even put the question, and therefore sinks into a sub-human form
of existence. So long as the problem of meaning is alive and
burning, the spirit of man is alive. But where man ceases to ask
this question, there the spirit is extina. Man jumps from one
experience to another, just as a squirrel leaps from branch to
branch, and the oneness of his life is dissolved. It is in asking
the meaning of life that man becomes aware of the totality of
this existence.

Meaning is totality, wholeness. If we say, " This word has a
meaning ", what we are trying to say is that these difEerent
sounds or letters forming a word become one word through a
spiritual unity, which binds them together and makes them
intelligible. If we say that a phrase, a speech, a book, a work
has a meaning, we are pointing again to the Spiritual unity which
ties the parts into a whole. It is in this fashion that the Greeks
formed the concept or idea of Logos, implying by that word
what we call meaning. They called it that because it was in

60

UBANINO AND PTJRPOSE 6l

human speech (Logos) that the character of spiritual unity or
wholeness had struck their minds. Speech is the immediate
manifestation of meaning/'

It is possible to approach the problem of meaning from
another angle, which may be more familiar to modem man,
namely from the angle of purpose. To forge a hammer, to
build a house, or to plough the field has a meaning, because this
action serves a definite purpose. This purpose, which gives
meaning t© action, is primarily a biological one : self-preserva-
tion, the preservation of race, nourishment, safeguarding physical
existence. All these actions, which support the natural instinct
of life-preservation in its spontaneous utterances, and which
therefore place intelligence at the service of life-preservation,
have a meaning, because they serve an obvious purpose. But
the mental action which is placed at the service of vital necessi-
ties is not that which is distinctive for human life. The spiritual
stands here under the domination of animal nature and merely
completes what the natural instinct of the animal desires. The
specifically human comes to the fore only where man does some-
thing which goes beyond the realm of physical preservation,
whedier it be by the way in whidi it is done — eating, instead of
feeding, building houses, instead of creeping into holes — or by
the fact that goods are created or spiritual actions performed
which serve higher requirements than the necessities of life. The
meaning of human life therefore must become visible where
human action is not under the domination of natural urge but
of spirimal purposes. Where we have in mind such purposes,
the two concepts " meaning " and " purpose " merge into each
other. The animal has merely vital purposes, but man has such
purposes as have meaning in themselves and which, as such,
give his life its specific human stamp. It is in things or actions
which have their unity in their spiritual purpose that the spirit
expresses itself as the unifying power.

Meaning is therefore a fundamental factor of culture and
civilisation. Nay, one can even say that culture is materialisa-
tion of meaning. Culture is the creation of units which exist
only for the spirit. For the dpg there is no Rembrandt picture,

62 THE PROBLEM OF MEANING [lECT.

but only specks of colour, no Beethoven symphony, but merdy
a series of noises or perhaps tones. The spirit is the meaning-
creating and meaning-acknowledging power, and culture is the
totality of meanihg<Feating powers and meaningful creations
of man. But culture or civilisation taken by itself cannot in
itself answer the question of meaning, for the idea of meaning is
curiously inexorable. Because it means totality, it cannot be
satisfied with anything partial. The single work does net
suffice, the spirit cannot but ask for the totality of all works, of
all human doing. Just as one cannot be satisfied with the single
meaningful word, but only by the meaningful connection, of
single meaningful words through the spiritual unity of a speech
as a whole, or a book as a whole, so the spirit in seeking for
meaning demands the unity of man's life as a whole. Not even
the unity of all man's action is sufficient, because man's action
is in relation with something else — ^with nature, with the world
in which it is performed and with which it is wrestling by
thought and action. For that reason the mind, wherever it is
truly living, cannot but ask for a total meaning, and it is through
the intensity of this question that the aliveness of the spirit
manifests itself. Where this question of total meaning (x&ses
to be asked, the spirit is in a state of disintegration, and human
life is about to perish in a sub-human, animal existence.

That is why men have always asked for the meaning of life,
for a total meaning. They sought the answer in their religions or
their philosophies. The religious myths are to be understood,
in the last analysis, as attempts to interpret the total meaning
of existence. In the same way philosophy, in its truly great and
powerful forms, has to be evaluated as an attempt to discover
meaning by the use of rational thought; as the Greeks said,
Xoyw 8(8dvai. Here it is possible only to sketch a few of these
attempts. In Indian religion, the problem of the meaning of
life was answered by the doctrine of Karma — the circle of birth
or the transmigration of souls — and in the body of doctrines
teaching man how to get out of this circle of birth and to enter
Nirvana. These answers rested upon the presupposition that
this empirical existence, as such, is not meaningful, but that, on

V] WESTERN SOLUTIONS 63

the contrary, meaning consists in living and thinking in such a
way as to escape from this life. With regard to this life, then,
the answer is thoroughly pessimistic.

Another solution of the problem, impressive in itself, is the
ethical dualism of the religion of Zarathustra. The meaning of
life consists in supporting life and defending it against every-
thing which destroys and kills it. Here, also, the truly
significant thing it not life, as such, but eternal, imperishable
life, which one achieves by following that rule. By joining
battle with the good god in his fight against the god of de-
struction, man gets his share in the victory of the good god
and his eternal life. Apart from the answer of the Christian
Gospel, however, the most important solution of the problem of
meaning within Western history is that of Greek philosophy.
Of course, as we aU know, this philosophy is not a unity, but
presents itself in a variety of very different systems. But within
our Western history, it was primarily Greek idealism — this word
taken in a very broad sense — which became influential. The
meaning-giving principle of this philosophy is the divine Nous
or Logos, which permeates the world and forms it into a
Cosmos. It is the same Logos which underlies meaningful
speech and thought as well as aU cultural activity of man. Man's
speech and action are meaningful in so far as they partake of this
divine Logos. The divine Logos, then, is seen in closest con-
nection with the logical or rational element of our life. This
relation to the divine Logos appears in the various systems of
Greek philosophy — of Plato, of Aristode, of the Stoics, and
the Neoplatonists, in different settings, according as they placed
the emphasis more on the secular, the culmral, scientific,
artistic or philosophical element, or on the ethical and religious
aspect of human life. They aU have in common this reference
tp the divine Logos or the ideas, as that which contains the
meaning, and are therefore akin to each other in a marked
rational and immanentist tendency. It is the divine reason,
immanent in our reason and in our reasonable doing and
thinking, upon which the meaning of life is grounded.**

Within the Christian doctrine and faith the principle of

64 TBB PROBLEM OF MEANING [lEGT.

meaning, i.e. that which gives meaning to our existence, can be
summarised also by the word Logos. We recall the pregnant
3nd, at the same time, cryptic words of the Prologue to St. John's
Gospel : " In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was
with God and the Logos was God. The same was in the begin-
ning with God. All things were made by Him; ... In Him
was life; and the life was the light of men . . ." etc. No
doubt it is this Logos in which the whole world has its meaning-
ful foundation as well as its meaningful end, in which therefore
the meaning of human life is mysteriously contained. But this
Logos is not the Logos of Greek philosophy; there are three
radical differences between the two. The first is that it is not an
abstract principle, an " it ", as it always is in' Greek philosophy,
but a person — " in Him, all things were made by Him and in
Him was life ". The second is to be seen in the fact that this
Logos is not an immanent element of the human mind or spirit,
but given to man by historical revelation as the secret of God's
essence and will. Finally, it is not a timeless, fixed truth, but
the moving dynamism of history, the definite manifestation of
that which in the end of time brings with it the victory of the
divine will over the powers that threaten the meaning of life,
and which perfects historical revelation in eternal life, thus
completing the meaning of historical, earthly existence.

It might appear, at first glance, that this conception of mean-
ing would be closely related to that of Persian dualism, which
we have just been sketching. As a matter of fact, certain
common traits as well as certain historical connections between
the two cannot be denied.^' All the same, there is an unfathom-
able gulf between them. One should not over-emphasise the
difference between the Christian conception and the element of
metaphysical dualism in the conception of Zarathustra. For
this dualism, after all, manifests itself as being less than ultimate
by the certain victory of the good god over the evil spirit. The
opposition between the two lies soqjiewhere else, namely in the
fact that in Biblical revelation the idea of God's mercy. His
redeeming grace and love, is central and dominating, whilst it
is entirely absent in the religious system of 2^rathustra. Here

V] LOGOS AND MODERN IDEALISM 65

it is the good men who, by the proof of their moral nnoerity,

acquire panicipation in the final victory and eternal life, whilst
in the Christian Gospel it is the sinners, graciously pardoned and
saved by the atoning sacrifice of Christ and God's merciful
forgiveness, who become participants in eternal life and thereby
in the completion of meaningfulness. It is therefore not to be
wondered at that within Christian history and Western history
at large, the Persian solution of the problem does not play any
conspicuous r61e. The discussion is primarily between the
Biblical revelation on the one hand, and Greek, idealism on the
other.

This discussion between the two predominant principles of
meaning within our history — between the Greek Logos-
principle and the Biblical revelation of the Logos-Son, of Jesus
Christ — marks the beginning of the modem epoch. From the
end of classical antiquity up to this point, the Christian idea had
been entirely dominant, although not in its original purity.
Modem spiritual history, on the othe^ hand, is characterised
primarily by a progressive displacement of the Christian, the
transcendent, revelatory, personalistic conception of meaning,
by an immanent, rational and abstract principle. Human
reason sets itself on its own feet. It thinks itself capable of
solving the problem of meaning from its own resources. That
is why European thought re-established its cotmections with the
models of Greek philosophy. Of course, this could not be done
without thorough-going modifications and variations. Two
essential traits, however, remained in common between the
modem and the Greek conceptions of meaning : the predomin-
ance of the rational, logical element and the tendency towards
an immanent solution. Meaning must prove itself in its
rationality, and the realisation of meaning must take place
within this temporal existence. This limitation necessarily
produced, in recent centuries, the new idea so characteristic of
our epoch, about which we have already spoken in the last
lecture: the idea of progress.**

If rationality on the one hand and this historical existence
on the other are to be sufficient to answer the question of the

66 THE PROBLEM OF MEANING " [lECT.

meaning of life, it is necessary either to prove this existence to be

rational, or to show the possibility of believing in rationality,
in spite of the present irrational character of existence. The
first of these two ways is that of Theodicy, the proof that
what exists is at least approximately rational ; it was possible only
(as we see in its greatest example — that of Leibnitz) as long as it
was possible to draw considerably from the Christian theological
tradition. It is therefore no mere chance that as soon as this
method — the Leibnitzian Theodicy — lost its power of convic-
tion, the second began to be taken.^^ The death of Leibnitz
coincides almost exactly with the appearance of the idea of
progress, first in the form of an idealistic, speculative philosophy
of history, later in the form of a naturalistic, pseudo-scientific
evolutionism.

Those who had broken with the religious faith of the Christian
tradition and were still seeking a meaning for existence, could
certainly not be expected to find that rational meaning within
the given realities of the natural and cultural life of their time.
The elements of negation and destruction of meaning were too
obvious even for the most optimistic rationalist to ignore them.
From this diflBculty the idea of progressive evolution seemed to
afEord an escape. This world is not yet rational and therefore
meaningful, but it can and it shall become so. How is it possible
for it to become rational? The answer was: It can and will
become more and more rational by a progressive spiritualisation
of nature and human life in the course of cultural expansion;
by a progressive elimination of what is really or seemingly
irrational, by rational action and rational thought, therefore by
a double evolution of the powers of divine reason immanent in
man through his action and his thought. It was this idea of a
spiritual evolution and the progressive elimination of irrational
dements by cultivating and educating the individual, by exten-
sive and intensive increase of cultural and civilising action, as
well as by progressive knowledge, which gave the last two cen-
turies their dynamic V/an and their feeling of assurance.

It was inevitable, however, that in the course of this movement
the tendency towards this-worldliness became more and more

V] PREDOMINANCE OF THIS- WORLDLINESB 67

conspicuous and predominating. The high-minded, idealistic
evolutionism of Herder, Humboldt, Schleiermacher and Hegel
gave way increasingly to a more realistic and earth-bound prin-
ciple of progress, which was related more closely to the interest
of the average man, and was also more credible than the idea of
a progressive spiritualisation of the world. As the stream of *
idealistic enthusiasm began to decline, its place was taken by the
more prosaic idea of scientific and technical progress, of the
spread of democratic freedom, and of overcoming irrationality
by raising the level of general education. In all these fields
progress was conspicuous to everybody. Moreover, it was in
close relation to the practical interest and everyday life of the
large majority of men. The surprising and truly revolutionary
achievements of technical industry, the no less astoimding
progress of natural science, the rapid spread of democratic
institutions and of general education seemed to justify this
belief in progress so completely as to place it beyond doubt.
Mankind became intoxicated by these visible and indubitable
manifestations of progress, in the sphere of its practical needs,
to such an extent that there seemed to be no room or capacity
left to meditate seriously on the profound problem of life's
meaning. All those things which direaten the meaningftllness
of man's life — death, evil, suffering — all these voices were
drowned by the loud-speaker of progressivism.

This optimism, threatened by the truly irrational social con-
ditions, which had actually been created by the revolutionary
progress of technical industry, could be sustained only by the
hope of a social paradise which Karl Marx preached as coming
inevitably. But then came the time when this intoxication
began to wear off, when it became more and more apparent
that, in spite of all school education, men were not becoming
better, that, in spite of all technical progress, life had not become
more human, but on the contrary more and more inhuman.
Above all, the disillusionment was hastened by the first great and
the second even greater shock brought' about by the first and
the second world-wars, with their revelation of demoniac, even
diabolic, backgrounds of human existence and human nature.

68 THE PROBLEM OF MEANING (lECT.

The belief in progress had played out its fatally dazzling rdle,
and Western humanity, which had staked all its hope on this
one card, found itself facing the nothingness of despair. Now,
in view of the ruins of his civilisation, in uncertainty as to
whether the past storm, which had destroyed in a few years
what centuries had built, might not soon be followed by another
even more terrible, which would mean the end of all civilisation,
perhaps the end of humanity itself — ^now, raced by all this,
mankind experiences the dawning of the fearful and disastrous
thought that life probably has no meaning at all.

If, looking back from the standpoint of Christian faith, we
ask ourselves why this has happened, and was bound to happen,
it will not do to point merely to the last degenerate forms to
which the idea of progress had fallen a prey, or jn which an
already decaying evolutionary creed expressed itself. It is not
in these obvious and most recent extremes, but in the first
spiritual and exalted beginnings that we have to discover the
roots of the evil. We have to go back as far as Greek idealism,
and its fundamental conception of the principle of meaning,
in order to understand the completely nihilistic disappearance
of meaning which has threatened our generation. The first
thing we can observe, then, is that this idealistic principle of
meaning was based entirely upon the " formal " side of the
human mind. It is the possession of reason which distinguishes
man from animal; it is reason by which man produces culture
and civilisation ; it is reason that links man to the divine. It is
sufiicient, it appears, that man has reason. Reasonable or
spiritual action as such confers meaning. One does not ask
what this reason thinks, what direction spiritual activity takes ; it
is the possession of reason in itself that makes man human and
links him to the divine. Reason, as such, is the divine. You
can find this same idea even nowadays in the speeches and
writings of eminent spiritual leaders, repeated and varied a
hundred times: "We believe in the spirit, in reason, in the
human mind as that which gives life meaning and makes man
human ".

From the Christian point of view, this idea can be seen as a

V] FORMAL CHARACTER OF CULTURE 6g

great illusion. Human reason as such, spiritual activity as
such, can be both good and evil, godlike and diabolical. There
is a godlike and there is a godless use of- reason. Therefore there
is a possibility of culture being according to God, and also of its
being quite godless. The possession of reason, of intellectual
activity as such, is no guarantee of truth, goodness, and true
humanity. The principle of the truly human, of goodness and
truth is higher than reason. It does not lie within the sphere of
the formal, not in a that, but in a what, not in the possession and
use of spiritual powers, but in the right use, in the right relation,
in the right decision, in that self-determination which is accord-
ing to God's will.

The formalism of the idealistic principle of meaning is
founded, as we have already seen, in a second factor, in the
theological immanence-conception. Man is — ^that is the assump-
tion here — partaker of divine nature by being a reasonable
creature. The divine element is immanent in him because the
divine element is in itself reason, the same reason which also
dwells in him, in man's nature. Therefore, idealism cannot
understand what we Christians assert, that evil is a spiritual
thing, an act of reason and not of sensuality. For the idealist,
evil is that which is divided from the spirit, emptiness, the
reason-vacuum, therefore animal sensuality and brute instinct.
The acknowledgment of the spiritual nature of evil would
explode the whole philosophy of immanence. Therefore the
idealist cannot but refuse to admit this conception of evil, and
by doing so he is bound to minimise evil. Only that evil which
is understood as spiritual is truly evil. What comes out of
animal nature is not really evil : it is pre-moral primitivity.

Let us consider the same idea from a third point of view. The
Greek idealistic conception of meaning is primarily taken fi^om
man's cultural activity. Indeed, culture is a primary manifesta-
tion of the meaningful; as we said before, culture is the
materialisation of meaning. But, as we shall see more clearly
later on, culture itself is primarily formal, because culture is the
expression of a given spirituality or spiritual condition. Cul-
ture therefore is not in itself the human, but it is an instrument.

70 THE PROBLEM OF MEANING [lECT.

an expression of the human; just as mind is not the human but

the organ of the truly human. Culture is the expression of the
given spiritual status, good or bad, human or inhuman, of a
certain time or group. It is related to the truly human as the
style of a speech or a book is related to its content. You can
express truly diabolical ideas in the most superb style, and it
can hardly be doubted that the devil, if he wants to be, is a
very brilliant stylist. Therefore there can be false culture, just
as much as false spirituality — even anti-human, godless culture.
Culture, then, is not in itself the measure of humanity but merely
the measure of the degree of spiritual intensity, whether good
or bad. This misunderstanding which accepts culture as the
criterion of humanity is, however, the fatal error of both ancient
and modem idealism, and of modem thinking at large.

Now, this whole mistmderstanding, implied in the Greek
idealistic principle of God-immanence, stands in the closest
relation to what the Bible calls sin. Man, understanding him-
self in that fashion, understands himself primarily as divine.
He accepts as his nature what is in fact a divine gift. He wrongly
assumes his rational nature to be the content instead of seeing it
as a vessel. It is Hamann, the great Christian seer of the i8th
century, who has called this " the misunderstanding of reason
about itself". He points to the origin of the German word
" Vemunft ", which is derived from " vemehmen, annehmen ",
" to receive ", and therefore expresses a relation of receptivity
and dependence. Trae reason would be that which receives the
divine, not that which thinks it has the divine in itself, or that
it is, in its depth, the divine. True reason, then, would be only
that which does not think it has the meaning of existence in
itself but is ready to receive it from God. Greek idealism, in its
pre-Christian form, remained in a measure religious, because it
believed in the objectivity of the divine Logos. The idealism
of modem times, however, having branched off from Christian-
ity and left Christian tmth behind, could not fail to become
irreligious, and contained a dangerous element of rebellion
which was lacking in the old Platonism. That is the funda-
mental reason why the emancipation from Christianity,

V] MEANING A DIVINE GIFT 71

introduced and begun by modem idealism, ended in such

meaninglessness.**

According to Christian faith, the meaning of life is not in
man— neither in his rational namie nor in his rational or cul-
tural work — ^but comes to him as a divine gift, as the Logos,
which is the revealed Word, and as that Word which is the
self-revealing God. Meaning, then, comes from transcendence,
out of the mystery of divine being, the Logos, that (as the fourth
Gospel says) " was in the bosom of the Father This mystery
does not remain in its transcendence; it reveals itself, it com-
municates itself. This Logos is the self-communicating Love of
God, which in itself is personal being : the Son of Love. It is in
Him, through Him, that human life receives its true humanity,
its goodness and truth. "Grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ."*' Man's life receives this Word by an act which is
mere reception — the act of faith — and this faith manifests its
essence as being divine love by " working itself out in loving

Now, in this fact — that man's life has no meaning in itself and
in his own creation, but has to receive it — lies the possibility that
the negative powers, death, evil, suffering, which threaten the
meaning of life, can be regarded without palliation, without any
attempt at theodicy, in their sheer, naked negativity. It is the
Christian faith alone which makes no such attempt to extenuate
evil, as is found, for instance, in the Neoplatonic idea that evil
belongs to the good just as the contrast is necessary for harmony,
or in the older Platonism in the identification of evil and animal
instinct. No, evil is understood as sin ; evil, understood as sin,
means rebellion against the divine will, destruction of die good
order of God, disintegration of the totality or wholeness of
human life, hence, as the radical negation of meaning. Simi-
larly, death is not glossed over as a mere fact of nature belonging
to the Cosmic order; death also is ranked among the anti-divine
powers threatening and destroying the meaning of, life. Death
is an " enemy " and not a friend. Because these two elements,
sin and death, and the suffering issuing from them, determine
the character of human life in such a fashion that nothing is
untouched by them, no attempt is made to understand eardily

72 THE PROBLEM OF MEANING [LECT.

existence in itself as meaningful. On the contrary, it is
explicitly affirmed that this temporal existence, taken by itself,
is meaningless, even contrary to meaning. And this applies to
the total history of humanity as well as to that of the human
individual. Historical life does not have meaning in itself. It
acquires it from outside itself, and where this happens, there this
earthly history comes to its end, there the new aeon begins, life
eternal.

It is, however, just the knowledge of this coming new existence
which gives this earthly historical life a share of the eternal
completion of meaning. To live in this hope by firm belief is no
mere expectation, but is in itself the beginning of the ultimate
realisation of meaning. For that divine love, which is the end
of all things, is not a thing merely of the future, but it is a
present reality for and in the believer. This love. Agape, is the
new principle of life of the Christian and the Christian com-
munity. The divine ultimate meaning, life in the Love of God,
is present redity in faith, although imperfect and wrestling with
those powers threatening the destruction of life and its meaning.

If we compare with this vision of historical reality, as it is
given in Christian faith, the highest conception which the idea
of meaning has acquired within a non-Christian interpretation —
namely, within idealisric evolutionism — we see, quite apart from
its unreality, the disguised resignation implidt in this idea of
progress. The tremendous difference between the two is in the
single fact that, whilst the Christian Gospel makes every
believing individual a partaker of the ultimate perfection, the
completion of meaning for the individual is most uncertain
within any idealistic conception of history. Who, after all, has
the profit of this infinite progressive movement? Every genera-
tion has to sacrifice itself, to place itself beneath the feet of the
next generation, so as to raise it higher, merely in order to be in
itself a mere step on the infinite road of humanity to a far-off,
never attainable goal. But for me, as individual man, there is
little enough consolation in the thought that those coming after
me are a litde nearer the goal, without reaching it themselves.

We need not bother any more about this tempting but illusory

V] ESCHATOLOGICAL SOLUTION 73

and fontastic idea of universal progress. History itself has given
judgment on it. The negative powers of human nature, which
threaten to destroy all the meaning of life, even the bare physical
existence of humanity, have shown themselves with such naked
brutality that the idea of universal progress as the solution of
the problem of meaning is utterly discredited. This fact can
mean one of two things. It can mean the lapse into complete
despair about the meaning of life, resignation to the fact that
there is no such meaning, that it is better not to ask this question
at all but to content oneself with the fragmentary and transient
glimpses of meaning, which are inherent in human life and
activity. Or it can mean that humanity turns its mind towards
the Gospel as the only interpretation of existence, which is, at
the same time, both realism without illusion and promise of
fulfilment without resignation.

Two things must be said, however, about the Christian faith
as solution of the problem of meaning in our time. First,
it is not easily come by. Probably it never was. But for cen-
turies it had the advantage of being the accepted creed of the
Western world. Whether this was an advantage with respect
to its true understanding can be doubted; it certainly had an
important bearing on the formation of cultural stability and
homogeneity. But this is gone. Christian faith has become,
as it has never been since the first centuries of the Christian era,
a matter of personal decisicm. The second point is this. Whilst
Christian faith is the same at all times with respect to its founda-
tion and content, it is different in every age as regards the
frontier line along which it joins battle. The frontier line of our
age is neither that of the first centuries, which was marked by
rival religions, nor is it that of the Middle Ages or that of the
Reformation era, when it was marked by rival interpretations of
its foundation and content. In our time the frontier line is the
alternative to a philosophy of despair, hidden in a number of
more or less subtle evasions of the problem." Apart from these
disguises, the question placed before man in our time is quite
simple: Despair and pay the price of despair, or believe the
Gospel and pay the price of believing! What the price is of

74 THE PROBLEM OF MEANING

gaining the meaning of life, as the Gospel alone gives it, the
Gospel makes clear enough. This must be added to what was
said about the Gbristian conception of the meaning of life:
such a conception cannot be gained by any theoretical argu-
ment. The Gospel will always be rejected when it is misunder-
stood as merely a satisfactory theory. To understand what it
says about the meaning of life, and to see that this is the truth,
is identical with that total change of the character and orienta-
tion of life which is implied in the words, repentance and faith.
It is only in these acts that the Gospel-perspective can be won,
and with it the solution of the problem of meaning.

VI

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

WITH this lecture we enter the field of those questions
which may be called problems of humanism or the
humane. The first of these problems comes £rom
without; it is raised for us by the universe in which we find
ourselves. All humanism, whether of a Christian or idealistic
type, draws its life from the conviction that man's position
within this Cosmos is a distinctive and, indeed, a unique one, and
that man has to vindicate against nature something which
belongs to himself alone. All humanism gives man a place over,
against and somehow outside of nature and elevates him
above it. Therefore there is an inescapable either/or between
this opposition of man and nature on the one hand, and on the
other a conception of continuity which ranges man entirely with
nature, and thus destroys the foundations of humanism.
Humanism therefore, since it can be destroyed by a complete
naturalism of this kind, is not a self-evident proposition.

Now it is curious that this nature-continuum, which denies the
uniqueness of man and thereby sinks the human element in
nature, stands at the beginning as well as at the end of the
human history which we can survey. For the primitive mind
there is no demarcation between man and surrounding nature.
On the contrary, man and nature form one unbroken continuum.
This appears primarily in the scheme by which primitive man
interprets his relation to the animals The totems of primitive
tribes show that man believes in a real consanguinity between
himself and certain animals, and thereby in a real descent of
man from the animal world. Priniitive man is, so to speak, a
pre-scienufic Darwinian, and the Darwinian of our time, by
the same token, is a scientific primitive, if by Darwinism we

75

76 MAN IN THE UNIVERSE [lECT.

understand a popular evolutionary philosophy rather than a
strictly scientific hypothesis. There is, however, this consider-
able difference between the primitive and the modem nature-
continuum, that in the world of primitive man the continuity is
not established entirely at the cost of man. In the same measure
that man is akin to the animal, the animal in its turn is akin to
man. For the primitive mind, nature as a whole is somehow
human. In this primitive world there are no " natural forces "
in ihe present meaning of ihe word, but only forces which are at
once of a personal and in some measure of a spiritual nature.
Nature behaves in a way similar to man. You can talk with it,
and it talks to you. All this is foreign to the conception of the
modem Darwinist. Nature for him is conceived of as an object,
i.e. it is radically non-personal. Nature is primarily a mechan-
ism, and this is an idea entirely foreign to the primitive mind.
The nature<ontinuum of modem times is established exclusively
at the cost of man. Man has ceased to be something particular
within a world which is conceived of in terms of mechanism.
Therefore he is himself something like a highly-complicated
mechanism. Whilst the primitive mind arrives at its scheme of
continuity by the personification of nature, the modem mind
arrives at it by a depersonification of man. It must now be our
task to discover the backgroimd of this change in trying to
summarise the history of man's thought about his place in the
universe.

It is by a slow process that man has overcome the primitive
nature-continuum. I would suggest that the best guide for the
discovery of the history of human emancipation from nature is
plastic art. The continuum is still living in all that mytho-
logical art which represents natural forces, understood as deities,
in human shape as well as in animal — such art as we find in India
as well as in old Egypt and Babylon. The decisive breach
within this continuum happened in two distinct places : in Israel
and in Greece. Leaving apart for the moment the Biblical
concept of man, we may say that it is the unique contribution of
the Greek mind to have abolished the animal shape of deity.
In the mythological straggle of the Olympic gods against the

Vl] ORB&K HUMANISM 77

semi- and totally bestial monsters, against the figures of the dark
regions, there comes to the fore something of this unique inner
liberation which takes place within the Greek conception of man.
Man rises above the animal world; man becomes conscious of
his uniqueness as a spiritual being distinct from a natural world.

But now, alongside this emancipation from and destruction of
the nature-continuum, another process takes place, expressing
itself again in plastic art, namely the rapprochement between
deity and humanity which appears in an anthropomorphic
deity and in the apotheosis of the human hero. This double
process, fiist taking place in the subconscious forms of mytho-
logy, enters the full light of consciousness in philosophical
reflection. Man discovers in himself that which distinguishes
him from the animal and nature as a whole and elevates him
above it, the Nous or the Logos, that spiritual principle which
underUes ail specifically human activity and gives man's work
the character and content of human dignity. Now, this Nous or
Logos is, at the same time, the principle which links mankind
with the divine ; the Logos is not merely the principle of human
thought and meaningful action, but also that divine force which
orders the world and makes it a Cosmos. It is the divine spark
in human reason by which alone man emancipates himself from
namre and places himself above it. It is that same divine spark
in his reason in which he experiences the divinity of his inner-
most being. The continuum, then, is not broken, but shifted.
Just as the divine Logos permeates nature and orders it, so it also
permeates and orders man. But in man this divine principle
becomes conscious knowledge. It is in the recognition of him-
self as partaker in the divine Logos that man becomes conscious
of his specific essence and value ; his humanity is, at the same
time, divinity. This is the fundamental conception of Greek
humanism in its conscious reflected form, freed from mythology.

In Biblical revelation the continuum of primitive mind is
disrupted in an entirely different manner. A three-fold barrier
is erected here : the barrier between God and the world, between
God and man, and between man and nature. God is no more
the immanent principle of the world, but its Lord and Creator.

78 MAN IN THE UNIVERSE [lECT.

He, the Lord-creator, alone is divine. Everything which is not
Himself is creature, product of His will. Therefore He is
opposite the world. His essence. His divine being, is other-than-
world. He is the Holy One." That is why He does not allow
Himself to be depicted in any form: " Thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven ima^ nor V^y likeness of any thing that is in
heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the
water under the earth ". But now — and this is the second
barrier — it is not merely the nature-image of godhead which is
forbidden to man, but equally the man-image. By that same
character of holiness by which God is distinguished from nature,
He is also distinguished from and placed opposite to man. Man,
in spite of every thing he has and is, with all his spiritual as well
as natural powers, is not divine. He is a creature. The barrier
which separates God and the world also separates God and man.

All the same, in spite of this sharp separation from God, man
is not placed on the same level as the rest of the world and not
seen in continuity with nature.'^ Although man is not at all
God, and God is not at all man, man is distinguished from all
other creatures and elevated above them by a criterion of a
specific kind. Man alone is created in the image of God. This
likeness of man to God is the third barrier which is erected here.
For man alone is created in the image and to the image of God.
And this imago dei is the principle of Christian humanism as
distinguished from Greek. At first sight it might appear as if
this concept of imago dei meant somediing similar to the Greek
idea that man is raised above the level of nature by his participa-
tion in the divine Nous or Logos dwelling in his reason. But
the similarity between the two principles of humanism is merely
apparent, for man's being created in the image of God does not
imply any kind of divine spiritual substance in man, but only
his relation to God. That which ^ves man his specific place in
the Universe and specific dignity is not something which he has
in his rational nature but his relation to the Creator. This
relation is established by God's calling man to Himself and is
realised by man's hearing this call and answering it by his own
decision. That is to say, between God and man there exists the

Vl] CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 79

relation of calling and responsibility founded in the divine Word
and man's faith, a faith which works through love.

Christian humanism therefore, as distinguished from the
Gireek, is of such a kind that the humane character of existence
is not automatically a possession of man, but is dependent on
his relation to God, and remains & matter of decision. The
humane character of man is not guaranteed in advance like a
natural disposition. It realises itself only in that answer of man
which corresponds to the divine call. There is a possibility of
its not realising itself but of being perverted through a false
decision into an untrue inhumane humanity. Even more : not
only can this happen, but it has actually happened. It is the
case that man has made the wrong decision and has thereby lost
his true humanity, and can regain it only by a new act of creation
of God, by redeeming grace. However, even the man who has
lost his true humanity has not altogether lost his distinctive
human character. In spite of his wrong decision, he still is and
remains within that primary relation of responsibility and there-
fore retains — ^if not the truly humane content — at least the
structure of human being. He is still distinguished from the
rest of creation by the fact that he, and he alone, is a responsible
person. Furthermore, to this man who has lost his true humane
character, God, by His revelation of divine redeeming love in
the God-man, Jesus Christ, has offered the possibility of re-
acquiring the true image of God; and, lastly, to those who accept
this offer in obedient faith, the perfection and realisation of their
eternal divine destiny is promised as the final goal of all history.
That, in a few words, is the basis and content of Christian
humanism.

Although the great difference between Christian and idealistic
Greek humanism is quite obvious, they have at least this in
common, that in both man is given a pre-eminent position in
the Universe and is set over against and above nature on the
sub-human level. In both man has a higher destiny, lifting him
above the natural sphere and functions, and naaking him a par-
taker of a divine eternal meaning. In both the humanum has a
rich content and is distinctly separated from the animal world.

8o MAN IN THE UNIVERSE [lECT.

Therefore it is not surprising that where these two great streams
of humanism met each other in history they did not merely
flow alongside one another, but merged into one. Thus there
was formed in the first centuries of our era something like a
Christian-Greek or a Christian-idealistic humanism, a synthesis
in which sometimes the classical, sometimes the Biblical element
was predominant. But these two kinds of humanism were never
clearly seen in their specific nature and so distinguished or
separated from each other. It was only in the middle of the
second millennium that a double-sided process of disentangle-
ment or dissociation took place, on the one side from a genuinely
Christian or Biblical conception of man, on the other side from a
renewed classical idealistic humanism. The one we call Refor-
mation, the other Renaissance." In previous lectures we
mentioned the fact that the spiritual history of recent centuries
is on the whole characterised by a progressive emancipation
from Biblical revelation and, hence, by a progressive domination
of the rational element. The question which we have to answer
is why this process led to a complete dissolution of humanism in
the naturalist nihilism of our own day.

It is customary to answer this question by pointing to two
epoch-making scientific discoveries, namely the revolutionary
change within the conception of the spatial universe connected
with the name of Copernicus, and that other no less revolu-
tionary re-establishment of the nature continuum connected
with Ae name of Darwin. There is no doubt that both the
destruction of the geo-centric world picture and the expansion of
the spatial world into the infinite, as well as the doctrine of the
descent of man from animal forms of life, came as a tremendous
shock to the generations which these discoveries took by sur-
prise. But in both cases it has become clear that this shock was
of a psychological rather than of a spiritual nature. For, if we
contemplate diese discoveries dispassionately, it becomes clear
that, whilst they were bound to shake the frame of the traditional
world-picture, they could not by their own truth destroy or even
endanger the substance of humanism, whether Christian or
idealistic.

Vl] A NSW OBO-CKNTRICISM 8l

In defending themselves against unconoideied consequences
drawn from these diaicoveries, idealistic and Christian humanism
have a common interest. They have to make clear the difference
between the results of scientific research and the false interpre-
tation of these results by a naturalistic philosophy. The
Copemican destruction of geo-centridsm could, if I may use the
phrase, he easily digested both by Christian and idealistic
himianism For, after all, what has the assertion of the inde-
pendence and superiority of man over nature to do with the
quantitative extension of the spatial world or with the destruc-
tion of an astronomical geo-centricism? That man, quantita-
tively considered, is a mere nothing in the Universe was known
before Copernicus and often found expressed in the language of
Homer as well as in that of the Old Testament. To anyone who
understands that the human character of existence is no matter
of quantities, but of quality, the multiplication of man's quanti-
tative disproportion with the Universe, involved in the new
cosmology, cannot make any difference. No one has given
dearer expression to this fundamental perception than Kant,
in calling his idealistic philosophy a reversal of the Copemican
revolution.** As the knowing subject, man stands above the
world which is his object, whether it has the lines of the ancient
or of the modem picture of the world. In a similar fashion.
Christian theology, knowing that man's eminence is based upon
God's call in His revelation, understands without difficulty that
this revelation is not tied up with an astrophysical geo-centridsm.
For those to whom it seems difficult to separate these two points
of view, it may be comforting to hear that modem astrophysics
has, as Eddington pointed out," established a new kind of geo-
centrism, based on the observation that it is highly improbable
that there are other celestial bodies besides our earth furnishing
the conditions for the development of organic life and therefore
of something like human existence. The earth, then, seems to
have an exceptional place even in the modem world-picture.
If, however, one likes to conceive of reasonable beings independ-
ent of organic substance, it would not be difficult to relate such
a view to the Biblical concept of an angelic world. However

88 MAN IN THE UNIVSRSE [lSCT.

rias may be, the Copemican discovery and its enlargement in
modem astrophysics cannot legitimately be regarded as a serious
danger for any kind of humanism.

The case of Darwinism seems more dangerous. Granted that
the hypothesis of the descent of man from animal forms of life
has become a scientifically established fact — whether this is the
case or not, science alone can decide and seems as yet not to
have decided definitely — does this not mean that the continuity
between man and animal is established and therefore that man
has lost any claim to an exceptional position? If this were so,
this would no doubt mean diat humanism has lost its basis.
The human would be nothing but a transformation of the
animal. There would be no independence or superiority of the
spiritual, humane element, no possibility of speaking of
"higher" and "lower" in a qualitative or normative sense.
Man would be nothing but a more differentiated animal, and
ethics nothing but a form of natural instinct for the preservation
of the race. But once again dispassionate contemplation of the
facts and their implications shows that to draw such a conse-
quence from the zoological data is entirely illegitimate. The
specifically human can never be derived from the animal, even
if it is true that the specifically human element begins to appear
in such a minimal form that its distinction from the animal is
difficult. After Darwin, just as before him, there is between
man and animal the same unbridgeable gulf, included in the
concepts of spirit, culture, responsible personality. A concept is
different from associated sensations ; a logical or ethical norm is
different from a fact of nature; culture and civilisation are some-
thing difEerent from satisfying biological impulses; responsible
personality is difEerent from affective individuality. If man as
zoon is a mere species of the family of mammals, he is as
humanus different from all animals and from all nature by just
those elements which make up the humanum. Man alone pro-
duces cultural life : this is the argument of idealistic humanism.
Man alone can hear the word of God : this is the argument of
Christian humanism. It is not science, but an imconsidered and
scientifically unsound philosophical speculation, which claims to

Vl] COPERNICUS AND DARWIN 83

have shattered the pFe-eminent position of man within nature by
discovering man's animal past. The true scientist experiences
his exceptional position as hummus in his own field. It is the
privilege of man alone to produce science, to investigate truth
for the sake of truth, regardless of animal appetites and
necessities.

If this is true, and the basis of humanism has not been shaken
by modem science, it is all the more surprising that Copemican-
ism as well as Darwinism have actually produced effects within
the course of spiritual history which point in the opposite
direction. As a matter of &ct, Copemicanism in the largest
sense of the word, as well as Darwinism, has contributed to the
dissolution of humanism and to the rise of present-day nihilism.
Again, it is our task to try to understand this process and its
causes in order to come to a true understanding of our present
spiritual situation. It is to be expected that such an inquiry
will produce important results. We ask first why Copemican-
ism has shaken the C3iristian Church and theology to such a
degree that even in the beginning of the i8th century the
government of the canton of Zurich strictly prohibited the dis-
cussion of this theory." Looking back, the answer is not very
difficult to find. Copemicanism had this effect because the
Church did and had done for centuries what it should not have
done. The Church had mixed up truth-of-God with world-
tmth. It had established and dogmatically canonised the
Biblical world-picture of antiquity, which because of its origin
we call the Babylonian world-picture, with its three stories : the
fiat plate of the earth ; above it and on the same axis, so to speak,
the sky or heaven; below it the underworld. This ancient
world-picture is merely the vessel in which the divine revelation
is given to man, but has itself nothing to do with that revelation.
The Church and its theology therefore were forced by science
to withdraw from a realm which was not theirs. Natural sdence
has helped the Church to understand its own tmth and essence
better than it had understood them in the course of preceding
centuries.

Nevertheless, Christian theology was not altogether wrong in

84 MAN IN THE UNIVERSE [LEGT.

iu apprehension with regard to Copemicanism. Theology
should not have opposed science, but it was right in opposing a
certain philosophical consequence drawn from the Copemican
discovery within, the rationalistic humanism of the time. This
Renaissance humanism in its turn used the new world-picture
as a weapon against the Christian doctrine of revelation as such.
It used the Copemican theory, as we see it, for instance, in the
example of Giordano Bruno, as a foundation of Pantheistic
philosophy axid mysticism." In the humanistic movement of
emancipation from Christianity, Copemican astrophysics was
quite unjustifiably impressed as an ally. Again, rational human-
ism is not alone to blame for having done this. It vras the
Church which, by her mistaken orthodoxy, had caused this error
on the other side. The blow which the Church struck against
Copernicus was warded otE by rational humanism with a Coper-
nican blow against the Church. However, whilst the Church
recognised her error in course of time, the philosophy of
Enlightenment, the heir and successor of Renaissance humanism,
continued the fight on the same level, and does so to this day.
In this manner Copemicanism became, although per nefas, an
important element in the formation of a de-Christianised
humanism.

The case of Darwinism is analogous. Once again Christian
theology confused God-knowledge and world-knowledge, and
fought fiercely against a strictly scientific hypothesis, i,e. the
theory of evolution. In particular, it was Darwin's idea of man's
animal origin which the Christian Church at first misconceived
as a death-blow against a central Christian doctrine, namely
man's being created in the image of God. This error was com-
prehensible and pardonable, because it took some hard thinking
to disentangle the faith content of the imago dei doctrine from
the traditional anthropological conceptions. But it was an error
all the same." This mistaken opposition to Darwinism on the
part of Christian theology has, however, a positive side. It was
not without reason that the Church was afraid of the false and
most dangerous philosophical use that would be made of this
scientific discovery — a use which, if it became victorious, would

Vl] DISSOLUTION OF HUMANISM 85

mean no less than the end of any kind of humanism. This
erroneous and, in its consequences, fatally dangerous exploita-
tion of Darwin's theory took place indeed in the development
of an evolutionist system of philosophy in the latter part of the
19th century. The quintessence of this was the thesis that man
is nothing but a highly differentiated animal. This " nothing
but " theory was indeed the end of any kind of humanism and
the beginning of the naturalistic nihilism of our day.

How was this evolutionist pseudo-scientific philosophy
possible? It is necessary here to return to something which we
have noted in a previous connection, namely to that transition
from a truly idealist humanism grounded in an idealistic meta-
physics to a positivistic anti-metaphysical philosophy. It is
best understood if we take Kant as our starting point. From
Kant's critical idealism, which gave rise to such genuine forms of
humanism as that of Humboldt and Schiller, two very different
philosophical schools developed: the absolute or speculative
idealism of Fichte and Hegel on the one side, and an anti-
metaphysical critical philosophy on the other, which led on to
positivism. In Auguste Comte's Religion de Phumanit^ a
remainder of ethical idealism survives, a reflection, so to speak, of
idealistic light without a source of its own. The same is true in
thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. They all
hold a kind of ethical idealism cut off from its roots. All these
philosophers eagerly and sincerely intend to salvage some kind
of humanism, but cannot give it any satisfactory theoretical
foundation. It was into this philosophical context that the
Darwinist theory was launched, and by it developed into a
system of evolutionism with the essential doctrine that man is
nothing but a highly differentiated animal. It is obvious —
although there are still many who do not know it — that on such
a basis humanism of any kind is impossible. Humanism
degenerates, if I may use the word, into a mere hominism.'*
The human becomes a mere natural datum. On such a natural-
istic basis it is impossible to distinguish the human from the
animal and to vindicate for man any kind of independence
against nature. If the nature-continuum is the only reality.

86 MAN IN THE UNIVERSE [lEGT.

there can be no spiritual norms, no conscience, no higher
destiny. The talk of "higher" and "lower" is then a mere
fagon de parler; it simply means biological differentiation which,
as such, has nothing to do with value or norm. It is, then, easy
to understand why, in the generation following Comte, Mill and
Spencer, further development of the evolutionary system
caused the last remainders of the idealistic humanism of earlier
times to disappear. If man is nothing but the highly developed
brain-species of the mammal-family, ideas such as man's dignity,
personality, the rights of man, human destiny lose their meaning.
The bankruptcy which, theoretically, already existed in the
generation of Spencer was declared in the following decades;
it only remained for the last generation to put it into execution.

The question arises: Was this inevitable and, if so, why?
Our answer is that it was inevitable if the emancipation fiV>m
Christian faith was to be carried through. We go back to the
point at which the double process of dissociation set in, in the
form of Reformation on the one hand, of Renaissance humanism
on the other. The Reformation was a tremendous attempt to
tear away from the traditional synthesis all those elements which
were irreconcilable with a truly Biblical understanding of man
and his destiny. That this attempt, grand as it was in its
beginning, was not capable of working itself out on the scale
which might have been expected, is primarily due to the fact that
the genuine Christian element was covered and falsified by a
false, orthodox absolutism, which necessarily provoked the
reaction of rationalistic humanism. The philosophy of the
Enlightenment is, in the first place, an unavoidable reaction
against petrified Christian orthodoxy. But why did it come
about that idealistic humanism degenerated more and more into
positivist naturalistic " hominism " ? I think the answer must be
that the germ of degeneration lies in the very foundation of
idealistic humanism itself, firstly, in its anthropology; secondly,
in its metaphysics.

Idealism, in order to keep its conception of man, inevitably
splits human personality into two parts: into an animal or
sensual, and a spiritual or divine part. But lyhat am I, this

Vl] IDEALISM AND INDIVIDUALITY 87

concrete individual man? If, according to the principle,
principium individuationis est materia, my individual person*
ality belongs to the lower parts, then it has no spiritual founda-
tion and dignity. If, however, personality belongs to the divine
part, how then could it be individual and plural? Idealism
separates spirit and nature. But am I the spirit, or is the spirit
my spirit? Since the days of the Stoics the attempt has been
made to solve this problem by the idea of a divine spark. Man's
mind is a spark of the divine spiritual fire. If that is so, its com-
bination with an individual must be a kind of banishment, a
state of imprisonment, according to the old Pythagorean phrase :
a&fui o^fta (the body is a tomb). This individual spirit, then,
must tend to reintegration in the divine spirit, and individual
personality is merely a provisional, not an essential and definiuve,
state of being. Then I, this individual personality, am destined
to perish, my higher part being consumed within the divine
spirit, my lower part going back to nature. Therefore it is not
I, this individual person, who stand over against the natural
world; but there are two general, impersonal entities opposite
one another, the universal divine mind or reason and marterial
nature. But I, this individual Ego, am desdned to vanish into
these two imiversal impersonal entities. I, as personal individu-
ality, am not superior to nature, my individual self is lost either
way. What does it matter whether it is lost in the divine mind
or in material nature? It is this doubt of the value of individual
personality which is inherent in all idealism, and this is one of
the sources of the further degeneration. What interest can
individual man have in a kind of humanism which is so dis-
interested in tiie metaph^jrsical value of individual personality?

The second point is closely related to the first. Ancient
humanism grew out of ancient religion; its metaphysics was a
rational transformation of pie-Christian religion and mythology.
Now this religion was destroyed by Christianity and no en-
thusiasm for classical Greece could revive it. Modem idealistic
humanism grew out of the Christian tradition. It was, so to
speak, a rational by-product of Christian theology. In so far as
tills humanism, following its tendency to rationality, detached

88 MAN IN THE UNIVERSE [LECT.

itself from its Christian foimdation, its metaphysical content
became thin and uncertain. True, there were some powerful
thinkers who were able to develop an idealistic metaphysic as the
foundation of this humanism. But these systems were, first,
altogether comprehensible only to a small elite of qualified
thinkers and could not affect the large majority. Apart from
this, such a theoretical idealism was too abstract, not to say
abstruse, to be a plausible solution of the problem of reality.
Already in the first half of the 19th century this idealism had
played out its role. It was, as we have ^already seen, only the
non-metaphysical idealism which remained, and which formed
also the transition to that positivist philosophy which was the
grave of all true humanism. An idealism which was only
capable' of holding fast ideal values and postulates, without any
foundation in being, had no power of resistance against the wave
of naturalist realism with its causal explanation of everything,
including man. Thus the emancipation from Christianity,
which in the time of the Renaissance was begun with so much
enthusiasm, ended in a stark, crude naturalism within which
there was no room for genuine human values.

True Christian humanism is, however, still an unfinished
project in a world hitherto called Christian. It is a debt which
the Christian Church owes to the world to this day. Christianity
cannot be exculpated from a great share of guilt in the modem
attempt to found a rational humanism independent of Church
dogma and Church authority. This is not the time, however,
to portion out the guilt of the past, but to find the basis of a true
humanism. It is the task of the lectures which follow to show
why this basis can be found only in Biblical revelation. In this
lecture we have been dealing with one aspect of the problem
only: man's place in the Universe.

The Christian doctrine of man's being created in the image of
God does two things: it places man within nature and at the
same time elevates him above it. Like' all nature, man in his
totality is a creature. Just as that psalmist, who had to teach us
such important things about the true perspective of the world,
was able to reconcile both his being created by God and his

Vl] THE "imago DEI" 89

origin as an embryo in his mother's womb," so the truly
Christian conception of man does not reject the idea that the
human race has its origins in a pre-human realm. And just as
the men speaking to us in the Bible always knew that man is as
nothing in the God-created Universe, a truly Christian concep-
tion of man does not exclude the idea that in the spatial Universe
there -is no above and no below and no middle. At the same
time, the Christian knows that God has called him to the
dominion over all the earth, because He has created man, and
man alone, in such a way that he has to execute God's will, not in
blind, dumb and ignorant necessity, but in hearing God's word
and answering Him by his own decision. In this call he re-
cognises the deepest foundation of his personal being and his
elevation over all the rest of creation. It is through this God-
given dominion over nature that he is given the power and the
right not merely to use natural forces, but also to investigate
nature by his own God-given reason. But the man who knows
himself as bound by the word of the Creator, and responsible to
Him, will not misuse his scientific knowledge of the world by
using his reason to raise himself up against the Creator and to
emancipate himself from Him by a false pretence of autonomy.
He will not become one who, detached from God, is the prisoner
of his own technical achievements. Of that we shall speak
later on.

This doctrine of the imago dei does not, however, stand on its
own right, but is comprehensible in its deepest meaning only
from the centre of divine self-revelation. Behind Christian
humanism stands, as its basic foundation, the faith in that Man
in whom both the mystery of God and the secret of man have
been revealed in one ; the belief that the Creator of the Universe
attaches Himself to man ; that He, in whose creative word the
whole structure of the Universe has its foundation, has made
known as His world purpose the restoration and perfection of
His image in man ; that therefore not only the history of human-
ity, but llie history of the whole Cosmos shall be consummated in
God-humanity. It is this aspect of the Christian conception of
man that gives him his incomparable and unique place in the
Universe.

90

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

Nothing that astro-physical science has brought or will bring
to light about the structure of this Universe, and nothing that
biological science has discovered or will discover about the con-
nection between sub-human and human organisms, can shake or
even touch this truly Christian theanthropocentricism. If it is
true that God created man in His image, and that this image is
realised in Christ's God-manhood — and faith knows this to be
true — ^then nothing, either in the sphere of nature or in that of
- history, can uproot this humanism, unless it be the loss of this
faith. But where this faith is kept, where it is alive in the power
and purity of its origin in the revelation of the New Testament,
there Christian humanism does not merely consist of a human-
istic conception of man and his place in the Universe, but is at
the same time a power which must stamp all aspects of daily
life as well as cultural life at large wi^ the mark of true
humanity.

VII

PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY

THE history of mankind begins with collectivism. Primi-
tive man and primitive society do not know individucd
personality. Man is an entirely generic being. The
individual does what everyone does, thinks what people as a
whole think. Just as primitive man does not clearly distinguish
himself from the animal, so the individual is not distinct within
the collectivity. The collective mind completely dominates
primitive society. The oldest civilisations which we know, those
of Egypt and Babylon, are thoroughly collectivist. Their
cultural achievements remain anonymous with the one excep-
tion of the king. But his elevation from the anonymous
remainder is not due to his personality, but to his social-political
function. It is exactly this fact — that the king, as bearer of
highest public authority, bears divine attributes and is revered as
a being descending from the gods — ^which shows the tremendous
predominance of the collectivist and institutional over the
personal.

In the discovery of individual personality Greece is the pioneer
nation. Perhaps we might daim the myth of Prometheus as the
earliest beginning of the emancipation of the individual. No
doubt in this process the tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides plays an important part. But even before that there
began, not in Athens but in Asia Minor, a detachment of the
individual from collectivity and its institutions. This is the
significance of philosophical reflection as it originated on the
shores of Asia Minor and in Sicily and which significantly
developed from the start as a rival to myth. Now, for the first
time, there are some bold individuals who dare to think in-
dependently, to criticise mythology and to emancipate them-
selves from tradition. In Athens the democratic republic is

9«

92 PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lECT.

founded as an expression of the same mind ; sophistic philosophy
and individualising comedy, with its add criticism of society,
arise simultaneously. Single creative individualities come to
the fore; works of culture are called after their creators;
individual fame is no longer limited to military bravery, that is,
to action in favour of collective security, but passes over to
thinkers, poets, artists. Fame is not only, as we are apt to think
nowadays, a matter of personal vanity and ambition; the
phenomenon of fame shows that the individual becomes con-
scious of hi^ personal value. It is by this process that classical
antiquity becomes a model which has never been surpassed for
individualised cultural activity and individualised humanity.
The human face presents itself in an innumerable plurality of
markedly individual faces.

Moreover, it is as if this emancipation from collectivity had
no sooner begun than it ran to the opposite extreme. In sophistic
philosophy, individualism has already reached such a radical
expression of extreme subjectivism that Athenian society is
shaken to its moral and religious foundations. It is about the
same time that Athenian democracy is in danger of falling prey
to an anarchic mob-rule. The emancipation of the individual
seems to end in a complete, sceptical dissolution of all objective
norms. But, thanks to unspent moral and religious reserves, to
a prevailing sense of social necessity, and — ^last but not least —
thanks to the great achievement of Platonic and Aristotelian
philosophy, this subjectivist sophism remained an episode or a
crisis which was overcome. It is only after this that Greek
humanism reasserts itself, and the concept of humanity and the
human is formed.*'

In the full sense this is not yet true of Plato and Aristotle,
because for them the humane is identical with the Hellenic.
Beyond the realm of the Greek language begins that of the
barbarians, which cannot be considered as truly human. And
for those great thinkers the existence of the slave — that is, the
man without dignity or rights — ^is taken for granted. But this
limitation of classical philosophy is soon overcome in Hellen-
istic, particularly Stoic, philosophy. The vision extends itself

1

Vn] INDIVIDUAL PXR80NALITY 93

beyond the Greek into the human as such; the sense of human*

ity as a whole is formed for the first -time; the word homo sum
becomes the highest title of nobility. The recognition of the
indestructible human dignity of every being having a human
face becomes the highest ethical principle. The principle of
humanity is discovered and is, one must say, preached — ^not only
taught — with a high religious feeling, particularly by the later
Stoics on Roman soil. So it might appear that classical anti-
quity, the Greek mind, has done all that was to be done in the
discovery of humanity. It has brought forth both individual
personality and universal humanity.

All the same, it was not this Greek humanism which became
the main foundation of Western humanism. That was kept in
store for another power of a totally different character — ^for
Christianity. No doubt the Christian Church has absorbed
within itself since the time of the earliest Fathers a good portion
of the ancient classical heritage of civilisation and humanism,
but the fundamental conception of man's essence and of true
humanity was a totally different one, not only in its basis, but
also in its content and in its practical consequences.

I should like to formulate this fundamental difference between
the Christian and the Greek conception of humanity in three
points : in the idea of personality, in that of community, and in
the relation between body and spirit. It will appear that those
three points are in dose necessary relation, so that we might call
them rather three aspects of one and the same thing.

I . We have been trying to show how much the Greek mind has
done for the discovery and appreciation of individual person-
ality. But the Greek idea of man is threatened by a fatal
either/ or, which can be seen by a comparative study of the older
Platonic-Aristotelian and the later Stoic concepts of the human.
In Plato and Aristotle a certain appreciation of individual
personality becomes possible by envisaging the articulation of
reason, proportional to its different functions. The consequence
of this individualising view is a scale or hierarchy of different
groups like the Greeks and the barbarians, the men and the
women, the free and the slaves. In Plato's state we are faced

94 PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lECT.

with a real caste-system based on this idea.*" Now the Stoics
dropped this hierarchical conception, and by that gave the
principle of humanity its full universality. Every man is essen-
tially equal to every other man, because the same divine reason
is indwelling in every one. But whilst this idea is the cause of
the universality of humanity, it also produces the impersonal,
abstract concept of man which strikes us in Stoic writings. It
is not this man here, in his individual being, who is the object
of my appreciation, but it is the divine reason dwelling in him,
dwelling in all identically. It is therefore an abstract,
impersonal, general principle to which our evaluation is directed
and which makes man human."

The Christian concept of personality is entirely different.
Here it is the call of God, summoning me, this individual man,
to communion with Him, which makes me a person, a respon-
sible being. " I have called Thee by Thy name. Thou art
mine." A divine I calls me Thou and attests to me that I, this
individual man, being here and being so, am seen and called by
God from eternity. This dignity of human personality is not
grounded in an abstract, general element in all men, namely
reason, but individual personality as such is the objea of this
appreciation because it is deemed worthy of being called by God.
Only the personal God can fundamentally establish truly per-
sonal existence and responsibility, responsibility being ^e
inescapable necessity to answer God's creative call, and to answer
it so that this answer is also a decision. God's call in love shall
be answered by man's response in love. By doing this — by loving
God as he is loved by God — man is similar to God. The loving
man, having received God's love, is God's image. The love of the
personal God does not create an abstract, impersonal humanity;
it calls the individual to the most personal responsibility.

3. With this first element, the second is in the closest con-
nection, namely the relation to community. As in Greek
philosophy reason is the principium humanitatis, no relation to
communion is based on it. Abstract reason does not tend to
communion, but to unity. In thinking I am related to general
truth, to ideas, not to the Thou of my neighbour. Activity of

yn] THB GALL OF ooo 95

reason has its meaning in itself, the wise man is self-sufficient,
he has no desire to go out from himself to another. In Christian
faith, however, it is the same thing that makes me an individual
person, which also leads me necessarily to my fellow-man: the
love of God. God in His free grace gives man His love and calls
him to receive it in order to give it back. Not reason, but love is
the principium humanitatis. In such a way, this love, ^ven
on the part of God, determines both the relation to God and
the relation to the fellow-man. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God," and the command that follows is equal with it: "Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." More than that, it is not
the divine commandment but the divine gift of love which is
the basis of true personality. God gives man His own love, but
He gives it in such a way that it cannot be received save in a free
act of reception, in responsive love, which is faith. Greek
idealism is a system of unity; Christianity, however, is revealed
communion.

This means the creation of a humanism of a very different
character from that of Greek idealism. Not reason, but love is
the truly human. Reason, spirimal ictivity, is subordinate to
love. It is an instrument of love. This is to say, also, that civi-
lisation is not in itself the essentially human, but is, in its turn,
an instrument, an expression, not in itself a purpose. In the
same way the rational principle of autarkia, self-sufficiency,
characteristic of the wise philosopher, is here impossible. Man
cannot become truly human except by entering into community.
He is called by the loving God into a loving relation to his
fellow-man.

3. This opposition in the basis of the idea of humanity —
immanent divine reason in the one hand, the transcendent
divine call of love on the other — expresses itself in a third sense
in a most characteristic and momentous manner. The Greek
principle of reason brings with it a dualistic conception of man.
Man is composed of two parts. By his reason, that is his higher
element, he shares in the divine being; by his body, that is his
lower element, man partakes of animal nature, out of whidi
ccunes evil. The one is the basis of his dignity; the other is the

g6 PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lECT.

cause of his ignominy, which can be mitigated only by the fact
that this lower part may be called unessential or accidental.
The Christian faith, answering the call of love of the Creator,
produces quite a different view of man's structure. The whole
man, body and mind, is God's creation. There is no more
reason to despise the body than there is to consider human
rationality as divine. The whole man, body and mind, is called
into communion with God and into the service of God. There-
fore there is no question here of the ascetic ideal, inherent in
idealism since Plato's Phaedo, that the spiritual is to be delivered
out of its entanglement with the body, or that this spiritual
freedom is to be maintained over against the world outside.
Here the task is to cooperate in the totality of this corporal-
spiritual personality with the work of God in the world, to give
oneself in love into this service, which is at the same time a
service for God and for man, and which is the expression of the
freedom and nobility of the children of God. We can guess
even now what a different conception of manual work must
result from these two different anthropologies. The ascetic
spiritualism, however, as we find it in the mediaeval Church, is
not of Christian but of Hellenistic origin, and is an exact
parallel to the Neoplatonic element in mediaeval philosophy.

Now, taking these elements in their unity — the principle of
immanence on the one hand, the divine relation of love and
reciprocal service on the other — a further essential difference is
revealed. In one of the most beautiful passages of Aristode's
Nicomachaean ethics, the chapter on friendship,** the great
thinker pronoimces as a matter of course that one can love only
those who are worthy of being loved. To love someone unworthy
would be a sign of an ignoble mind, a sign of a lack of the sense
of value. Now, Christian love is founded in God's love for
sinful and tmworthy man. This love, then, is received in the
consciousness of being unworthy of it; that means that tm-
derlying die Christian humanitas wd" find hutnilitas. Humility
is the most imambiguous sign of true love, just as love for the
tmworthy is its most genuine expression. This is the trait which
distinguishes Christian humanity most markedly from the

Vn] RENAISSANCE HUMANISM 97

idealistic Greek, and which is also the great scandal for many
humanists. It is, at bottom, the scandal and foolishness of the
Cross which become apparent here.

During the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era these two
forms of humanism — the Christian and the idealistic Greek —
lived together in a kind of association or amalgam without any
awareness of the specific character of either of them. Then, in
the middle of the second millenium, that double-sided process of
dissociation took place, of which we were speaking in the last
lecture, and which is the essence of the two principal movements,
the Renaissance and the Reformation. In the course of the
following centuries it became apparent that the temper of the
modem age favoured the first of these two movements. Mankind
was out to find an immanent and rational basis of civilisation,
and therefore gave preference to the Renaissance conception of
humanism. This, however, meant a progressive detachment of
European civilisation from its previously Christian basis. The
phases of this movement have already been sketched. The
starting point is a theism still closely coimected with the
Christian ; it is therefore a humanism based on a religious-
metaphysical foundation, whilst the terminus of this movement
is a naturalist positivism, which is not capable of giving a basis
to any kind of humanism, whether Christian or Greek. The
question consequently arises as to why the original programme
of Renaissance humanism, i.e. the restoration of the Greek idea
of humanity, was not carried out; or, to put it better, why the
process of emancipation from Christianity was not successfully
arrested in a revived classical humanism.

The answer to this question comes from what was said in the
last lecture. Greek humanism had not been a creatio ex nihilo.
It had been the rational transformation of ancient pagan religion
and drew much of its power of conviction from this religious-
metaphysical presupposition. Now this presupposition could not
be reproduced, pre-Christian religion having been completely
destroyed by Christianity. The humanism of the Renaissance
and even of the beginning of the Enlightenment could remain
unconscious of this fact as long as it still drew its life from the

98 PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lEGT.

metaphysical substance of the Christian tradition. But in so far

as this connection was lost, or consciously cut, the idealistic
humanism was hanging in the air. The systems of philosophical
metaphysics could not be an equivalent substitute for the lost
religious basis, if only for the reason that they were accessible
only to a small elite of philosophical thinkers. This meta-
physical background was definitely and purposely pushed aside
by the positivist movement and from that moment human-
ism had lost its basis. More and more it was replaced by a
naturalistic inhumanism, by a materialist collectivism, by a
pseudo-Darwinian principle of ruthless extinction of the weaker
by the stronger, or by a pseudo-romantic principle of the
powerful individual dominating the mass of the herd-people.

I should like to illustrate . this general movement more con-
cretely by showing the effect of this process within thase same
three spheres in which we have just been defining the difference
between Greek and Christian humanism. The first of these
points was the Christian foundation of personality in divine
election, in the personal call of the personal God. Now, for this
transcendent basis of personality was first substituted the
immanent principle of divine reason. In the beginning of
rational humanism — for instance that of Erasmus or that of
John Locke — this divine reason still had a close kinship with the
Christian idea of God. These fathers of rational humanism
were not even conscious of breaking away from Christian revela-
tion, but believed themselves to be within the Biblical tradition.
But the rupture, which had taken place unconsciously, became
increasingly apparent. The principle of reason was more and
more divested of its transcendent content. The metaphysical
interpretation, as it was given in the systems of idealistic philo-
sophy, could not resist the stream of modern secularism.

We can observe this change from a half-transcendental to a
flatly secularist interpretation of human nature in the develop-
ment of the three most important pupils of Hegel, namely
Feuerbach, Strauss and Marx. Whilst they all started as ardent
followers of Hegel's absolute idealism, they all ended in a flat
naturalism of a more or less materialistic character. But all of

Vn] MARX — ^NIETZSCHE — COMTE 99

them tried to retain some humanistic elements, although without
any theoretical justification. Feuerbach tries to safeguard some
elements of the idea of personality in his conception of the
individual," whilst Marx sacrifices personality to the system —
not to a system of ideas in the fashion of Hegel, but to the
realistic system of economy, in which the individual plays a very
subordinate role. Strauss, in his turn, comes out with a blunt
materialism softened only with a light aesthetic colouring, which
was all that remained of idealistic humanism. It was this poor
figure which provoked the wrath of another champion of the
new type of anthropology, Friedrich Nietzsche. His programme
is the total " transvaluation of values ", by declaring war on all
" backworlders ", as he calls the adherents of any kind of religion
or metaphysics, and the proclamation of the powerful individual
rising above the average mass and using it as the material of his
will to power. Behind these conceptions of Marx and Nietzsche
we see already dawning upon mankind the monstrous figure of
the totalitarian state, either in its post-Marxian Communist or in
its post-Nietzschean Fascist form — that totalitarian state in
which human personality is practically denied and abolished.

It would, however, be erroneous to think that this degeneration
of humanism had taken place only within the spiritual history
of Germany. Contemporaneously with that materialistic
development of Hegelianism, there arises in France Auguste
Comte's " philosophie positive ", with its negation of all meta-
physics and its proclamation of a Religion de I'humanite. In
England there was a similar school of thought, led by men like
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, with a similar tendency to
interpret man from merely immanent presuppositions, and still
to try to keep some humanistic elements within a naturalistic
context which was incapable of affording a basis for them. The
idea of evolution, forming the backbone in the French as well as
in the English system of positivist philosophy, was incapable of
safeguarding anything like an idea of personality, either in the
Greek or in the Christian meaning of the word. A highly
differentiated animal is no personality, personality being — ^in
distinction from a difEerentiated brain-animal — a certain relation

lOO PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lECT.

to transcendent truth, be it (as in the Greek conception) the
relation to the divine Logos, or (as in the Christian conception)
the relation to the person of the Creator. All the readiness of
individual positivists to retain the moral values of the Greek-
Christian tradition was in vain. You cannot have apples after
having chopped down all the apple-trees. That is why in the
following decades the representatives of this positivist, natural-
istic philosophy had to accept the consequences. They threw
out of their vocabulary the idea of human dignity and human
rights and substituted for them more realistic terms which fitted
into their naturalistic system.** It is, humanly speaking, almost
by chance that the domination of this philosophy in other
countries did not produce there the same effect that it did in
Germany an4 Russia, namely the totalitarian state, which is
nothing but positivist philosophy put into practice.

The change from idealism to naturalistic positivism becomes
particularly intelligible if we view it from the second stand-point,
the problem of community. Those early humanists of the
Renaissance and Enlightenment, who consciously or uncon-
sciously tried to emancipate humanism from its Christian basis,
were certainly not conscious of the fact that they thereby created
a sociological alternative of the gravest consequences. In the
Christian faith these two things are simultaneously and equally
granted: the independent standing of personality and the
necessity of commimity. It is the same call of God which
summons the individual to his freedom and independent dignity
and which summons him into communion and mutual respon-
sibility. The unity of personality and community is rooted in
the Christian God-idea alone. Apart from this basis the two
cannot co-exist. Apart from the Christian foundation this unity
breaks up into an either/or of individualist liberalism and
collectivist authoritarianism.

Idealistic humanism in itself has always been an aristocratic
doctrine. It is the life-conception of a bourgeois few. The
immanent divine reason, being the basis of personality, creates
the autarky of individual personality, the Stoic sage, who has
no need of anyone else. The humanist of the idealistic type is

Vll] DECLINE OF PERSONALITY lOI

a spiritual aristocrat, knowing that he has the divine spark in
himself and is therefore essentially independent. What leads
him to community is nothing essential, but merely outward
necessity, and this community is in itself not real communion
but a combination of a contractual character. There is no
original, organically necessary community, but only that kind of
community which comes about through certain purposes and is
therefore regulated by some kind of contrat social. It is not the
State only, but also marriage and every kind of community,
which rests on some kind of contrat social. Why should one
enter into a fundamental interdependence if every individual has
the essential in himself? Within this context community can
never be on the same level as independent personality, but only
something subordinate and casual. That is to say that idealisdc
humanism leads to an individualistic conception of society,
which in the end must have anarchical consequences. That is
why modem society, in so far as it has relinquished its Christian
basis, appears to be in a state of latent anarchy or dissolution.

With the middle of the 19th century there begins a fierce
reaction against this individualism, and this collectivist reaction
in its turn is worked out logically from a naturalist philosophy.
The alternative to idealistic individualism is not free com-
munion, but primitive tribal, not to say animal, collectivism.
It is the depersonalised mass-man, the man forming a mere
particle of a social structure and the centralised, automatic,
mechanical totalitarian state, which inherits the decaying liberal
democracy. Only where a strong Christian tradition had pre-
vailed was it possible to avoid this fatal alternative of individual-
ism and collectivism, to preserve a federal, non<entrali8ed,
pluralistic, organic structure of the State, and therefore to avoid
that sudden transition from a half anarchic individualism into a
tyrannical totalitarianism. But the societies of the West, which
abhor the way taken by totalitarian Russia, Italy and Germany,
do not yet seem to have grasped that, if the process of de-
Christianisation goes on within their society, they, too, will
inevitably go the same way.

The third point — ^namely the relation between spirit and

102 PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lECT.

nature — ^remains to be taken into consideration in order to see
these things clearly. In Christian faith man is seen as a
spiritual-corporeal unity; God is the creator not only of man's
spirit, but jtlso of his body. Therefore the bodily life has its
own dignity in the sight of God, and man is called into the
service of bodily needs as into a sacred service. The body is
" the temple of the Holy Spirit In the Christian Sacrament
an indissoluble connection of material bread and spiritual eating
is expressed. In the middle of the Lord's Prayer stands the
petition for daily bread. All this works together to make
impossible a one-sided spirituality. Man need not be ashamed
of his body and his bodily needs.

For idealist humanism, on the other hand, this bodily con-
stitution of man — this animal part, as he calls it — is the partie
honteuse of. his existence, his dignity resting entirely on his
spirit, which is his divine part. It is the animal impulse of the
body from which moral evil originates. It is the sensible
impressions and perceptions which keep the mind from forming
truly spiritual conceptions. The whole humanistic system of
values is based upon this contrast or opposition of animal nature
and divine spirit. It is therefore the liberation of the spirit from
the body which is the guiding idea of humanistic culture.*' It
is obvious that such a humanism cannot have much interest in
the economic conditions of man's life. That man is a being
who must eat, who has hunger, is a topic which remains outside
this dignified culture. There is no Holy Supper here, nor is
there a prayer for the daily bread to remind the spiritual
humanist of the sacredness of the body.

So exalted a spirituality could never be the spiritual home of
the average man. Much less could it be so, when — through the
Industrial Revolution — the economic element became the
dominating feature of his life. In the middle of the 19th
century this aristocratic spirituality had become impossible.
The reaction against this spirituality was inevitable. And come
it did, primarily in the form of a doctrine which plated the
economic element in the very centre of the whole of human
life, making it the very essence of human history, as did the

Vn] MATERIALIST COLLECTIVISM IO3

historical materialism of Karl Marx. The change could not be

more dramatic. Marx, the pupil of the philosopher who had
proclaimed the spirit as the only reality, became the creator of
a theory in which ideas and spiritual values were but an
Ueberbau, a superstructure, an appendix or reflex of economic
processes. But Marx is not the only one to make such a sudden
volte-face. There was also Friedrich Nietzsche, a solitary
thinker and poet, who came from a most dignified tradition of
humanism and scholarship, and yet proclaimed with prophetic
vehemence that doctrine of the transvaluation of all values,
which means the primacy of instinct above the spirit and the
will to power as the new principle of ethics. Aristocrat and
individualist through and through, he could not prevent his
teaching from becoming the programme of a mass movement,
comparable in size and vehemence only to the one which Karl
Marx had produced. Was it to be wondered at that the masses
getting hold of this programme took literally Nietzsche's
prophecy of the emancipation of instinct from the fetters of
metaphysics and religion, and understood his doctrine of the will
to power to mean what it said, namely that it was a practical
application of the Darwinian principle of the struggle for life in
which the strong survive at the cost of the weak?

Marx and Nietzsche" are the fathers of the totalitarian
revolutions and of totalitarian states. It seems paradoxical that
the extremest collectivism and the extremes! individualism
should flow together in one stream. But upon closer inspection
this fact is not at all paradoxical. The common denominator of
both systems is the complete depersonalisation of man. Whether
you understand man primarily as the animal, that has hunger,
or by the two categories of the herd-animals and the solitary
beasts of prey terrorising the herds, you come to the same result,
namely the elimination of man's personality, human dignity,
and the rights of man, placing them all on the level of nature-
phenomena. Naturalistic philosophy, whether of the Marxist
rationalist or of the Nietzschean romantic type, necessarily
means depersonalisation. In Communist totalitarianism, on the
one hand, and in National-Socialist totalitarianism on the other.

I04 PERSONALITY AND HUMANITY [lECT.

the seed of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche has germinated,
and in these two monstrosities, which are one in essence, the
movement of emancipation from Christianity has reached its
goal. This goal is, in both cases, the annihilation of the truly
human, the end of humanism.

We should not close this survey without one further observa-
tion. Why did that whole movement of emancipation arise?
Is it entirely due to man's unwillingness to bow his head before
the divine revelation, because he wants to hold his head high as
his own lord? Is the modem movement away from Christianity
exclusively caused by the desire for an autonomous reason? Is
not a cause also to be found within the presentation of this
Christian revelation by empirical Christianity? In other words,
should not the Christian Church take on its own shoulders a
part of the burden of responsibility for this tragic history? If
we think of that third point about which we have just been
speaking — the false separation of body and spirit, of bread and
divine will — ^we cannot ignore the fact that empirical Christianity
has been untrue to its own truth. The Christians of almost all
centuries have been guilty of a one-sided, false spiritualism which
neglected the daily bread for the spiritual bread and by a false
monastic or puritan disparagement of the body and its impulses
brought about the revolt of an ill-treated human nature. The
same could be said with regard to the other two points. If
the modem age is characterised by a false secularism or this-
worldliness, traditional Christianity certainly has to accept the
verdict of a false other-worldliness which, in its interest in the
eternal life, forgot the task of this earthly life. And finally,
whilst it is tme that the unity of the tmly personal and the
truly communal is grounded in the Christian revelation taken in
its original tmth, empirical Chrisuanity has failed to a large
extent to prove this unity practically. On the one hand, it has
produced an authoritarian, pseudo-sacred collectivism, a Church
of power and spiritual slavery; on the other hand, it has pro-
duced an orthodox misunderstanding of faith, i.e. a kind of faith
which was not united with love but was morally sterile, and
which therefore could not but repel those who had grasped

VIl] FAILURE OF CHRISTIANITY IO5

something of the gospel of love. It is a provable fact that these

short-comings of Christianity were among the main impulses
of the humanistic emancipation-movement. Thus, the de-
Christianisation characteristic of the modem age is, to a large
extent, the product of the infidelity of the Christians to their
own faith."

, Christian faith itself, understood in its purity, is the only sure
basis for, and an inexhaustible fountain of, a true humanism.
But it is no exception to that rule : corruptio optimi pessima.
The history of empirical Christianity is unhappily not only a
testimony of truest, and purest, and sublimest humanity, but
also in many cases it afEords the sad spectacle of incredible in-
humanity. Therefore the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not only a
judgment upon the secularised godless, but also upon the
godlessness of the Church and of the pious, who so often forgot
that faith in the Crucified implies the willingness to sacrifice,
and that the ultimate criterion of faith is faithfulness in the
service of the fellow-man.

But, whilst all this is true with regard to empirical Christen-
dom taken as a whole, it does not touch the Christian Gospel as
such. AH these short-comings are due to a misunderstanding
of God's revelation in Christ and to the failure of the Christian
Church to be truly Christian. It does not disprove in the least
that the Gospel of God's love is the only solid basis of a true
humanism which safeguards the dignity of individual person-
ality, essential, non-accidental community, and the unity of
mankind.

VIII

THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE"

IT is one of the paradoxes of modem history that in hardly
any previous epoch has there been so much discussion of,
and so vehement demand for justice as in ours ; and that at
the same time it is precisely those movements to which this
demand for justice has given rise wrhich have led us into a
condition that seems to be further off from justice than any
other. The idea of justice, although at first sight apparently a
rational and timeless element, is historical and variable. In this
sphere, as in most others, there are historical heritages that can
be acquired and lost again. No doubt there is a sense or feeling
of justice in every human being. It expresses itself in the most
unambiguous and spontaneous manner, particularly where one's
own right has been violated by others. But the contents which
kindle this feeling, the concrete notions of what is just and
unjust, are different in different times and within the different
civilisations.

In the first place we have to point to the connection between
justice and religious or metaphysical ideas. Whilst the occasion
on which, in the beginnings of history, the problem of justice
became acute was a thoroughly secular one, namely the judg-
ment of the judge, yet the idea or the feeling that this, the
pronouncement of judgment, is a holy affair is hardly lacking
anywhere. It is obvious that in all ancient civilisations the judge
is a sacred personality, standing under divine protection and
acting under the authority of a divine mandate. Whereas the
foreground of the judgment-court is a civic, secular institution,
its background is, more or less symbolically, visible divinity.
There is a divine order to which the action of the judge refers.
The civic order must somehow copy the divine order; the human
sentence must correspond to a divine will. This relation becomes

106

THE HISTORICAL HERITAGE IO7

particularly apparent where the sentence of the judge is not
merely the application of a written law, but a free finding. In
this case the request for just judgment directly implies that
relation to the superhuman order in which the just is pre-
supposed: to listen to this transcendent voice and to obey its
intimations is exactly what is meant by the objectivity and
justice of the judge's sentence.

Such a metaphysical or religious relation is included in the
idea of justice which for many centuries has been predominant
in the Western world. It is the idea of jus naturale or lex
naturae, in which the two main lines of our cultural tradition,
the Christian and the Greek heritage, are combined in a syri-
thesis of exceptional power. For more than two thousand years
the idea of lex naturae or jus naturale has been the basic con-
ception within the European understanding of justice, and one
of the pillars of European civilisation. Its origin is pre-Socratic
Greece. Solon, the great law-giver of Athens, pronounced it
as the norm of his legislative activity. To him as well as to
his successors the idea of the ^vmi hiKaiov, translated by the
Roman Stoics into lex naturae, was intimately and inseparably
connected with the idea of divine justice. That which is ^vaei
Mkoiov is the opposite of all human arbitrariness as well as of
mere opportunism. The ^vaei hUaiov, the lex naturae, carries
with it a deeply religious emotional content, from which the
ethical demand for rigid objectivity is derived. Justice is some-
thing holy; is it backed by divine order, divine necessity.

It was this religious basis of lex naturae, of the " natural law ",
that made it possible for Christian thinkers of early times to
incorporate this central idea of ancient civilisation into the
Christian system of thought. What the Greeks called " nature ",
and what to them was the unity of divine and natural order, had
to be interpreted in Christian terms as the order of the Creator
or the order of creation. In creating the world, God has given
to all things their order and by that their law. So, and not
otherwise, the Creator wanted them to be. It is only within the
last two or three decades that this idea of the divine order of
creation, or lex naturae, has been suspected of being a form of

I08 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lEGT.

natural theology which could not be acknowledged within a
truly Christian conception of God, man and world. But the idea
of lex naturae, or orders of creation, in no way prejudices the
question of natural theology- When the Church Fathers were
speaking of lex naturae, they connected it with that Logos in
whom the whole world is created and in whom creation has its
order, that Logos who became flesh in Jesus Christ. The Son of
God, incarnate in Christ, is the principle of the divine order of
creation and therefore of lex naturae. That is to say, the
Christian Church never had a lex naturae conception other than
a Christological one. Lex naturae was referred to that Creator
of nature who revealed Himself in Christ Jesus."

It must be admitted, however, that a certain relation to
natural theology does exist in so far as these orders of creation
and the principle of justice grounded in them, as well as the
moral law, are not entirely unknown to natural man. Whilst
the pagans do not know the Creator— or do not know Him
properly, as He can be known by His revelation in Christ — they
still know something of His orders, of His law. That is why
they know something of justice, although the depth of Christian
justice remains hidden from them. Justice, then, is a topic
where Christian and non-Christian thinking meet, where they
have a common ground without being identical. For this
reason alone it is possible to have a civil order, the justice
of which can be judged by Christian as well as non-Christian
citizens, and an international order agreed upon by Christian
as well as non-Christian nations. This was the reason why the
theologians of the first centuries were able to accept the Stoic
idea of lex naturae without hesitation, and to incorporate it into
Christian theology and juridical vocabulary. They could not
do it, however, without giving it a new interpretation. They
had to take it out of its Pantheistic context and place it within
the theological structure of Biblical revelation. They applied to
it the principle that the book of divine creation could be read
truly only in the light of historical revelation. Before we enter
this problem of the specifically Christian interpretation of
justice, I should like to follow the history of this idea to its end.

VinJ ETHICAL NIHILISM I09

This history, broadly speaking, runs parallel to that of
humanism, which we tried to sketch in pre\dous lectures. It is
an almost ludicrous misunderstanding, widespread as it is
among the jurists on the Continent, that Hugo Grotius is the
creator of natural law. The truth is that with Hugo Grotius
begins the decay of natural law, which had been the ruling con-
cept for two thousand years. For it was Grotilis who for the
first time tiled to detach natural law from its religious, meta-
physical basis. It was his explicit opinion that natural law
would be valid even if there were no God, because it was rooted
in reason. Now, Grotius certainly was a great scholar, but not
80 great a thinker; for otherwise he could not have failed to
become aware of the contradiction which existed between his
Christian idea of God and this idea of a reason and justice
independent of God. But Grotius stands in the beginning of
this movement, the main tendency of which is to detach the idea
of justice entirely from its theological or religious or meta-
physical context. The history of this movement is marked by
the same milestones as that of humanism : a religious foundation
of the idea of justice, without being Christian ; a transcendental
foundation, without being religious; assertion of the idea of
justice as such on purely naturalistic grounds ; and, finally, the
reinterpretation of justice as a merely fictitious idea forming an
instrument of self-preservation. In that manner the idea of
justice is dissolved and the end is an ethical nihilism proclaiming
the will to power or the autonomy of the economic motive.
" If the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? "
If the idea of justice is nothing but a conventional fiction, it has
lost its normative power. It may then be that justice is nothing
but camouflage for power interests, and that is its end."

Thus it is not surprising that a totalitarian state draws the
practical consequences of this result of the development of ideas.
The totalitarian state exists ideally in the moment when the
jus divinum is abolished, when the state is sovereign in the sense
of not being limited by any higher power, when it can declare
whatever it likes to be law, when there are no rights of man
which precede positive law and are valid whether positive law

110 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lECT.

proclaims them or not. The totalitarian state is the practical
consequence of the positivist philosophy of law. The positivist
conception of law has done away, theoretically, with the idea of
justice, the totalitarian state does so practically in ridiculing the
jus divinum and abolishing the rights of man.

The Western world, being surprised and shocked by the rise of
totalitarianism, has, however, little justification for complaining
or passing judgment on this latest phase of our modem history,
because for many generations it has helped to prepare it. It
has done so in a double fashion. First, as we have just seen, by
a gradual process of detaching the conception of justice from
its religious basis it has made justice a mere conventional fiction
of society and politics. This positivist conception of justice —
this negation of the jus divinum — ^was certainly not a speciality
of those countries which later on became totalitarian.'* England,
as well as France and Switzerland, has played its part in
this fatal European development of ideas. It was not seen that,
if there is no jus divinum, there is no limit to the sovereignty of
the state, there are no rights which the state has to protect, but
only rights which die state may give or take. It was through
the general blindness of the positivist era that the treasures of
the Christian tradition, immanent in our social structure, were
lost. It is this positivist philosophy which has prepared the
totalitarian state. By the same token, it is the totalitarian state,
canying the positivist philosophy to its conclusion, which makes
us see again the true nature of this positivist philosophy on the
one hand, and the religious implication of the idea of justice
on the other.

The second factor responsible for recent developments is not
so much of a direct as of an indirect nature. The rationalisdc
form of natural law, as it was worked out during the 17 th and
1 8th centuries — that form of natural law whidi seems to be
almost the only one known to the average jurist — is characterised
by a one-sided identification of justice and equality. According
to this, justice is equality. The idea of equality was the dynamic
element within newer political and social history. The Idea of
equality was the lever by which the ancien rdgime, the feudal

VIIl] JUSTICE AND EQUALITY III

Structure of society which had been based on inequality, was
thrown off its hinges. Equality was the great word of the French
Revolution. It was with his Treatise on the Inequality of Man
that Rousseau began his revolutionary critique of society.
It is the idea of equality on which modem democracy, following
Rousseau, is built. Equality is the by-name as well as the
ethical element in the newer Communist-Socialist movement,
in the political emancipation of woman, and in the social emanci-
pation of youth. Equality in the name of justice! It is
because equality and justice are identified that — as we said in the
beginning — ^there has been so much more talk about justice in
our time than in any other. What was meant was always
equality.

Now it cannot be denied that there exists a close relation
between justice and equality, and that therefore the request for
equality partakes to a high degree in that profound, deeply
ethical and religious justification which is necessarily connected
with the idea of justice. On the other hand, this one-sided
identification of justice and equality leads to an individualistic
conception of society which, in its turn, could not but ultimately
result in a dissolution of all community. If men are essentially
equal, - then they are essentially independent of each Other,
every one having the essential elements of being in himself.
The conception, then, is that the association of individuals is a
merely external one, brought about only by certain tasks which
are too vast or too heavy for the individual. The egalitarian
conception of man substitutes association for community.
Association, however, is a merely arithmetical form of being
together for co-operative purposes. It is thus that Rousseau
understood community." Community to him is an association
of a number of equal individuals for a certain purpose; it is not
in any way an expression of man's nature, but merely a conse-
quence of the weakness of individual man, and ^ therefore
something coming from outside. At the basis of this conception
we find the idea of the self-contained individual, the self-
sufficient man. It is no mere coincidence that Robinson Crusoe,
alone on his island and yet capable of having a truly human

113 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lECT.

existence, is the hero of the great novel of this era. Here is the

principle of individualism springing necessarily from the idea
of essential equality. It is at this time that all kinds of human
community begin to be understood from the point of view of
the individual, and therefore as something which is entirely
under his control.

That is why the idea of equality with its concomitant individu-
alism — meaning by that term the essential self-sufficiency of the
individual — ^is the deepest cause of that decay of communal life
of which we spoke in our last lecture. The idea of equality,
taken by itself, dissolves all essential communion which is based
on a primordial togetherness of men. The place of commimal
structure is usurped by inorganic association. The era of
associations has begim not only in the sense that now innumer-
able difEerent associations come into existence, but also in the
more significant sense that every kind of communion is under-
stood from the point of view of association. This is so in the
case of marriage, of the family, of the workshop, of the state.
The leading idea is Rousseau's idea of the contrat social. All
community life which has " grown ", all forms of communion
which have their roots in non-rational grounds are — at least in
thought — ^replaced by associations which are "made " and con-
ceived of in terms of contract. Now Rousseau had already seen
that the state, being formed by the contrat social, is necessarily
in a condition of r&uolution permanente. A unity which is a
mere association can dissolve at any moment. There is hardly
a state which has proved the truth of Rousseau's idea more
dearly than that which was the primary result of his conception,
in which Rousseau's political ideas were incorporated, namely
the French Republic. It is the thoroughly rationalised state,
and the main elements of this rationalisation are the ideas of
equality, association and contraa. The chronic crisis of parlia-
ment and government is its most visible expression. The
one-sided emphasis on equality in the conception of justice
proves to be revolutionary and ultimately anarchical.

Hie same is true within the sphere of economics. The idea of
equality here takes the concrete form of equal economic chances.

Vinl THE "CONTRAT SOCIAL" II3

At first it leads to the demand for free trade, for non-inteiference
with the free play of economic forces. It is the principle of
unhampered, economic liberalism — laissez faire. At the same
time as the feudal strucmre of the state, the guild-structure of
economic life and all patriarchical tradition with its non-rational
economic textures are broken down. Their place is taken by a
completely competitive economy, which means necessarily the
helium omnium contra omnes, the ruthless application of the
struggle for life and the survival of the fittest, the fittest meaning
in this context the most cunning and the toughest. It is that
kind of new economics as it was theoretically worked out in the
system of the " Manchester school " of Ricardo and practically
applied in the feamres of Friihkapitalismus. Even more imme-
diate and, broadly speaking, perhaps more disastrous, the
principle of equality and the individualistic idea of the contrat
social works itself out in the realm of marriage. Marriage also
is now conceived of as a contrat social, an association based on
free-will, having its foundation in certain purposes; therefore,
like every other association brought about by consent, it can
also be dissolved by consent. This individualistic conception
of marriage, issuipg from the egalitarian conception of com-
munity, therefore means here also the revolution permdhente,
which is nothing other than that well-known and much-dis-
cussed phenomenon of our dme which we call the crisis of
marriage. It is not so much sexual impulse and self-indulgence,
nor the general moral dissolution, but it is this idea of the contrat
social applied to marriage which is the real cause of the enor-
mous increase of divorce. The one-sided emphasis on equality,
leading to the idea of contractual association, has proved itself
in this field as well as in others as a radical element of dissolution.

However, the old paradox, that les extremes se touchent,
becomes true here. Rousseau, the father of egalitarian demo-
cracy and the father of the revolution permanente, is also one of
the originators of the totalitarian state. As a matter of fact, he
gave the idea of the totalitarian state a most accurate expression
by formuladng the principle that the cidzen creadng the
democradc state does so by an alienation totale des droits

114 I'HE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lECT.

indimduels.''* The democratic state is conceived in terms of the
totalitarian state — which is one more proof, by the way, that
totalitarianism is not identical with dictatorship. The totali-
tarian state is that state which exists by force of the aliination
totale des droits individuels. As Hitler's state was created by
popular vote and parliamentary decision, so is Rousseau's; but,
once created by popular vote, it is sovereign, total, irresponsible.
By the idea of aliination totale the principle of " the sovereignty
of the people " becomes the principle of " the sovereignty of the
state ", which means that the state, once created democratically,
is all-powerful. The people may elect, democratically, a con-
stituent body; that duly elected group may, however, create a
constitution which is in effect the abolition of democracy. Or
the people may elect a government which, in its turn, declares
itself indissoluble and organises a totalitarian state. The prin-
ciple of equality may lead to its extremest opposite, which is the
totalitarian state.

This is one road leading from equality to totalitarianism,
namely the formal, political road. The other one is economic.
The idea of equality can be understood not merely in the formal
sense of equal chances, that is, in the sense of unlimited economic
freedom ; it can also be understood in a material sense, meaning
an actual equal share in the economic produce or goods. The
same idea of equality which led to the French Revolution, and
produced modem democracy, is also the source of modem
Communism. It is at the root of the concepts of Proudhon,
Marx and Lenin.

That is not so paradoxical as it appears at first sight. If we
follow the line of thought which led Marx to the construction
of his Communist system, the link between the two — extreme
anarchic Liberalism and Communism — ^is obvious. Marx starts
with the idea that man has lost his independence by the division
of labour which made one man dependent on the other."
Division of labour, however, produced the capitalist system.
Therefore we have to reverse capitalism, and with it the division
of labour, in order to give man back his original freedom. It
is a well-known fact that Marx conceived his Communism not

Vm] CAPITALISM AND COMliUNISM II5

as a form of statMtructuie, but as the abolition, or rather dis-
appearance, of the state in a classless society. He believed that
the abolition of the class-system — which to him was identical
with the abolition of capitalism — would make the state super-
fluous, and would therefore automatically be followed by the
disappearance of the state. His ideal was thoroughly individu-
alistic, based on a philosophy of absolute freedom, as we shall
see more clearly in our next lecture. But out of this individu-
alism he developed his Communism as ameans to that individual
freedom.

Unfonimately his expectation did not materialise. The first
successful Marxist revolution led to the creation of the first
totalitarian state, that of Soviet Russia, which is not only the
first, but also the most consistent, of all embodiments of the
totalitarian principle. Quite contrary to Marx's own ideal
dream, it is the case that only a Communist state can be com-
pletely totalitarian, and that all non-Communist totalitarian
states, including Hitler's, are forms of dilettante or amateurish
totalitarianism. Thus the riddle from which we started has
been solved. The same epoch which has placed the idea of
justice in the centre of interest, has also produced that social
structure which is the complete negation of all justice, the 'totali-
tarian state. The clue to this riddle is a double one : the
detadiment of the idea of justice from the religious basis on the
one hand, and the identification of justice and equality on the
other.

But how are these two elements, secularism and egalitarian-
ism, related to each other? In trying to answer this question
we turn again to the Christian idea bf justice, looking at it now
from the point of view of content. We have seen that the
Church had accepted and incorporated into its own thought the
Greco-Roman idea of natural law, lex naturae, jus naturale. It
did so by identifying nature with God'is creation and the
law of nature with God's order of creation. Now this incor-
poration also meant a transformation. That which from the
time of the Fathers, throughout the Middle Ages and the eras of
the Reformation and of Orthodoxy, was called and thought of

Il6 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lEGT.

under the name of jus naturale and lex naturae was not the same
as Solon, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics had understood by these
terms. The first difference refers to the basis itself. The Greco-
Roman concept of lex naturae is, of course, pantheistic : nature is
God and God is nature ; therefore the law of nature is the law of
God, and the law of God is the law of nature. This pantheistic
equation is, of course, dissolved in Christian thought. The idea
of nature is, one might say, split into two parts: God, the
Creator, and His creation, with its God-given order. That is to
/say, God is above the order of creation. Hence justice, being
immanent in this creation-order, is not the highest, not the ulti-
mate principle ; the highest ultimate principle is love. For God
is Love in Himself, He is not justice in Himself." Love is His
own essence ; justice, however, is His will as it refers to the order
of His created world. That is why, in Christian thought, the
idea of justice always takes second and never first place : there is
an element of the preliminary in it. Just as the Gospel is higher
than law, love is higher than justice.

That does not mean that justice and law are two independent
principles. Such a dualism would be insupportable to Christian
thought. It is rather that justice is a manifestation of love.
Justice is that love which is applied to order; love, as it can
be realised within order or structure or institution. The origin
of all orders, and hence also the origin of justice, is like the origin
of creation as such: it is God's Love. That is why for the
Christian the service of justice and its orders is always a service
out of love. The motive of the Christian can never be any other
but love, even where the rule of his action has to be justice.
Justice derives from love; still it is not love in itself, but different
from love. The unity of origin does not remove the distinction
in content, just as the distinction in content does not remove
the unity of origin.

The Christian knows that he has to serve justice, because it
is the principle of God's order ; at the same time he knows that
this service of justice is not an ultimate and that respect for
justice is never sufficient as motive. This place is reserved to
love. With the drawing of this distinction there is already

Vin] JUSTICE SUBORDINATE TO LOVE ll^

established an enormous difference between the ancient and the
Christian ideas of justice. For the former justice is the highest,
the unconditioned ideal, and service rendered to the orders of
justice is the supreme task of his life. He is incapable of con-
ceiving anything which surpasses and transcends the idea of the
just order of the world. Because his God is not above the world-
order, his ethics cannot rise above that principle which is the
principle of ethicd order, namely justice. He does not know the
God of love, therefore he does not know that love which is above
justice. The Christian, however, stands in relation to these
orders of justice in the same way as he stands within this earthly
existence as such, namely as one who is looking forward to a
better country that is a heavenly one, to the city " whose builder
and maker is God"." The Christian knows that above the
demands of justice are always those of love — that he should not
merely treat his neighbour as a member of an order of justice,
but also, and above all, as a brother, as a man who, as a person
called by God, is more than any order of justice. Therefore he
will try — and never cease to try — to bring into the orders of
justice an element which is more than justice, although he knows
that this love, surpassing justice, can never fit into an order and
can never be expressed in terms of order and law, but only in
terms of personal relationship.

The second di£Eerence concerns the content of the idea of
justice, and that means its relation to the idea of equality. In
the Christian idea of justice, also, equality has its supreme im-
portance. All men are created by God equally in His image.
They all share in this original dignity of person conferred by
God. They all have the same essential rights, based on this
human dignity of God's creation. In this affirmation of equality
before God and of these original God-created rights, the Christian
doctrine of justice comes close to the Stoic one. All the same,
there is a distinction between the two of no small importance.
The Christian idea of rights, in distinction to the Stoic, has its
reference exclusively to man and never to God. Man has no
rights over against God, being His creature and property; he
lives entirely from God's grace and mercy. Rights he has only

Il8 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lECT.

in SO far as God gives them. Therefore the rights of man are
under the same reservation which applies to the whole sphere
of justice. They are always limited by the unconditional
imperative of love. The Roman idea, fiat justitia pereat mundus,
is unthinkable within the Christian context.

But, above all, the Christian idea of justice is different from
that of antiquity in that it gives to the element of inequality or
unlikeness its due place alongside that of equality. God has
created all equally in His image, but He has not created them
alike; on the contrary. He has created each one different from
all the rest, with his own individuality. This corresponds to the
personalism of the Biblical anthropology. The human person-
ality is based on the personal call of God. That means that
everyone is created in a unique act of creation, and therefore not
according to a general pattern, but as a unique individuality.
While the philosophers say: principium individuationis est
materia, the Bible says : principium individuationis est voluntas
dei creatoris. The differences between human beings are there-
fore not irrelevant, casual, immaterial, but just as much God's
will and creation as the equality of personal dignity.

The elements of equality and unlikeness, however, do not
stand on the same level. In Christ Jesus all differences, and
therefore all individuality, become irrelevant. " There is neither
Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither
male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."*" This is
the eschatological, and therefore the final, point of view. It is
within this earthly, preliminary existence that these differences
are to be acknowledged and taken seriously. It is here that the
preliminary principle of justice is valid. There shall be a time
when justice gives way to love, when the law shall be superseded,
when all the earthly conditions and limitations shall no longer
exist. Then the individual differences will play no r61e, but till
then they have to be acknowledged as God's will for this earthly
existence. God has given to every one his own " face " ; that is
why unlikeness comes into the idea of justice.

Of course, the fact of the unlikeness of man was not unknown
to the philosophers of antiquity, but from this fact they drew

Vra] UNLIKENESS AND EQUALITY UQ

conclusions which have to be repudiated from the point of view
of Biblical thought. They drew one of two conclusions. In
older Greek philosophy, as represented by Plato and Aristotle,
the unlikeness of man is the foundation of a different claim.
The unlikeness is primarily understood as a different partici-
pation in reason. Greeks have more reason than the barbarians ;
men have more reason than women ; the slaves have none at all.
They have to be treated accordingly; that means that the differ-
ence of men limits their equality of dignity and rights. The
later Stoics have another view. Their conception of man is
dominated by the idea of equality and equal dignity in such a
measure that they have no interest at all in unlikeness. It seems
to them something irrelevant, casual, not wordi taking seriously.
That is to say, the principle of equality encroaches upon
unlikeness. It is the exact reverse of the older view.

In Christian thought, however, the two elements of equality
and unlikeness are not in competition with each other and do
not limit each other, because they are on a different plane. Men
are equal in their relation to God, and therefore in their dignity.
They are unlike in their individuality, and therefore in their
function in the created world. There is but one and the same
dignity for all, just as theirs is only one and the same destiny
whether they are men or women, children or adults, black or
white, whether they are strong or weak, intelligent or dull.
Their final destiny being the same, their personal dignity caimot
but be the same. All the same, the individual differences are
not negligible. What God has created cannot be irrelevant or
negligible. The difference of individuality involves a difference
of the function within society.

Finally the two elements — equality and unlikeness, equal
dignity and different ftmction — are combined in such a way that
both get their full expression in the Christian idea of com-
munion. Because men are different from each other, they are
also dependent on each other. Man needs woman in order to be
entirely man ; woman needs man in order to be entirely woman.
This unlikeness points towards mutual completion and co-
operation. Individuals are different, like the liinbs of the body.

I20 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lECT.

each one having its own function for which it is fitted by its
individuality. The difference of function necessarily creates a
somewhat hierarchical order in service, which again rests on the
difference of individuality. According to his make-up, the one
is fit for a subordinate, the other for a superior position, the one
for a more extraverted, the other for a more intraverted function.
In this way the function of woman in marriage and family is
entirely different from that of man, and the function of the
children entirely different from that of the parents. This
difference, or unlikeness, in kind and function is exactly the
unity of the family as a community. It is so because this differ-
ence in no ways encroaches upon the equal dignity. Functional
subordination has nothing whatever to do with lesser dignity
or person. Society is thought of as a community of unlike
individuals, who are bound to each other by the necessity of
mutual completion and united by mutual respect for their equal
dignity. We might call this idea an organic conception of
society, but, in doing so, we must distinguish it clearly from that
conception of organic unity which we find in a certain Romantic
philosophy. For this Romantic organology lacks that element
which is decisive within the Christian understanding of society,
namely equality of personal dignity. Within Romantic thought
the person is subordinated to the social whole by some kind of '
mystical principle of a Gesamtpersdnlichkeit. The Romantic
conception is totalitarian or collectivist, robbing human
personality of its finality.

This, then, is the unique character of the Christian idea of
society and of justice: that it combines the two principal
elements of equality and unlikeness which everywhere else are
in conflict with each other. It is this combination of the trans-
cendental and the psychological, of the personal and the
functional aspect, which gives the Christian idea of jusuce a
flexibility, a dialectical subtlety, which no other has. It is
neither egalitarian nor authoritarian, it is organic and, nonethe-
less, spiritual. It combines the naturalistic evaluation of
different individuality and functional subordination with the
most unconditional acknowledgment of the finality of every

Vin] CHRISTIAN IDEA OF CREATION 121

person. Now this combination of elements, and therefore this
idea of justice which excludes both individualism and collecti-
vism, authoritarianism and egalitarianism, is essentially and
exclusively Christian. It is the Christian conception of divine
creation — creation by the individual call of God to the universal
destiny of all — which makes this possible and necessary. Apart
from its basis in Christianity, this combination is possible only
as a matter of chance without any inner necessity.

That is why the progressive estrangement of modem society
from Christian thinking inevitably entailed the consequences
which we have seen^ It created first an individualistic and
egalitarian liberalism, which led to latent or open anarchy.
This evoked the reaction of collectivism which, by destroying
himian personality, destroyed the foimdation of justice in the
totalitarian dictatorship. Without Christian faith and Christian
understanding of justice the world faces, therefore, a fatal alter-
native: either humanity tries to remm to, or to preserve, an
individualistic liberalism defending the rights of man, but
leading to the destruction of community, or it goes on along the
road of totalitarian collectivism, organising community by the
complete effacement of personality. There is a middle road,
namely the combination of personal finality and functional
structure which derives its inner coherence entirely and ex-
clusively from the Christian faith, or to be more exact, from the
Christian conception of justice, based in that of creation. By
this Christian conception of justice, personal life is the supreme
value and is to be defended against all totalitarian collectivist
encroachments. On the other hand, this highest evaluation of
individual personality does not lead to an individualism which
has no understanding of essential social unity. The true
Christian faith does hold the key to the solution of the social
problems of our time, so far as there is any solution within this
sinful world. The question is whether humanity will use this
key or whether it prefers to continue in the direction of recent
centuries, to its utter ruin.

122

THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE

[legt.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE VHI
Justice, Tradition and Patriarchausm

It seems to me to be justifiable and even necessary to deal here
with a number of questions which were raised in several dis-
cussions which this lecture on justice evoked : —

I. The relation of egalitarianism to tradition. It has been
observed by many that in England — as well as in Switzerland —
the deep-rooted liberalism and individualism of the people has
not produced the same dangerous quasi-anarchical effects which
can be seen in other democratic countries, as, for instance,
France; and it was often pointed out that this di£Eerence is
accounted for by the strong sense of tradition in the first, which
is lacking in so many other countries. But, so far as I know, the
inherent relation between egalitarianism and the lack of tradi-
tion has never been made quite clear.

Rationalistic egalitarianism is necessarily anti-traditional
because it claims equal right for any present decision with any-
thing that has been decided previously. An existing parliament,
elected by the people yesterday, has the right to upset to-day
what has been decided in previous times by previous parliaments,
kings, or simUar powers. Egalitarianism tends to the atomi-
sation of time, as it tends to the atomisation of commimal
society. It is, so to speak, an individualism of the time elements
on the basis of the equal right of any given time. Why should
that which previous generations have decided be binding for
me, for us, at this moment? Tradition — the assertion of con-
tinuity — ^is a non-rational principle, sometimes irrational,
sometimes suprarational, but, in any case, not to be accounted
for in rational terms. Behind the emphasis on tradition stands
a conception of man which is anti-individualistic, giving pi«-
ponderance to the continuum of the generations over against the
isolated present generation. It is the conviction of the tradi-
tionalist that the wisdom of past times, embedded in tradition,
is greater than the wisdom of the present generation, taken by
itself.

Vin] EQUALITY AND TRADITION 123

A similar idea is expressed in that system of checks and
balances which is the basic idea of that marvellous piece of
political wisdom known to us as the constitution of the United
States, and — still more so — of the constitution of Switzerland,
which is only partly modelled on the American. In both cases
the egalitarian, rational element is counterbalanced by elements
which allow past decisions to limit the freedom of decision of the
present, and upon which rests the stability of the whole political
structure. The interplay of the rational and individualistic
principle of equality with the non-rational and non-individual-
istic principle of tradition, or of checks and balances by past
decisions, is the clue to the mystery of the comparative stability
of these three democracies in comparison with those which are
based entirely on the rational principle of equaUty. If we ask
where this difference comes from, I think the answer cannot be
in doubt. It is the strength of the Christian tradition in all
these countries — at the time when their present structure was
formed — which accounts for this curious check on the egalitarian
principle.

2. Some cridcs of the lecture on justice seemed to be afraid
that its emphasis on the anti-egalitarian principle of unlikeness
might lead to a conservative patriarchalism. They objected
particularly to applying the functional principle to the power of
the state. As often happens, if one mentions several arguments
in support of an accepted opinion and one only against it, the
former are apt to be overlooked and attention only given to the
one. It should be clear from what was said in the lecture that
the principle of equality was put in the first rank, and adequate
reason was given for doing so. But our age is so dominated
by the egalitarian principle that even a hint at the fact that it
might not be the whole of wisdom is enough to arouse suspicion
of authoritarianism. I do not say that the family, with its
parental authority, is the pattern for all social order. I am quite
aware of the fact that the basis of the family is the " unlikeness "
of the child with the adult which places upon the parents a
responsibility for the child, which is never the responsibility of
the child. This is the specific unlikeness which is characteristic

124 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE [lECT.

of the family community. Therefore the specific structure
of the family ought not to be taken as the model for other
structures where this unlikeness does not enter. What I do say,
however, is that unlikeness of some kind occurs in all communi-
ties and ought to be taken into consideration as a positive and
not as a negative factor, being God's creation. A workshop or
factory is not a family, because the workers' relation to the em-
ployer is not that of immature children to the adult parents.
On the other hand, we feel without much reflection that it would
be a good thing if the workshop or factory was a little more like
a family than it is now. It is not, in this good sense, a family
exactly, because the merely contractual relationship makes that
impossible. What I plead for is that it should not be a merely
contractual association but more of a family-like unity, and that
this comes about only by giving due consideration to the
" organic " principle of community, based not only on equality
but also on unlikeness. The contrat-social idea is at the basis
of the class-struggle, because contractual association will always
be a competitive unit. Those who see the necessity of over-
coming the class-struggle by other means than those devised by
Karl Marx should be interested in finding an alternative to
mere contractual association. This is, if I am not wrong, the
tendency within that sector of the trade-union movement which
has become suspicious of both the old liberal and the new
collectivist model.

3. As far as the application of this conception of justice to the
state is concerned, the essentials have been outlined in my open-
ing lecture. There are two kinds of democracy: the rational
democracy of Rousseau and the Christian idea, including both
the rational element of equality and the non-rational element of
tradition and essential or organic community. It is true that
political power is not primarily to be understood as " function ".
Political power, ultimate decision over lifp and death, is a unique
problem, and its norms are different from those of any other
community. But it is just for this reason that the one-sided
emphasis on equality in this sphere is particularly obnoxious.
It works either in the diiectioii of instability, by the rigorous

Vni] RATIONALISM AND DELEGATION 125

application oi the principle of the sovereignty of the people, or
in the opposite direction of totalitarianism, by the principle of
the sovereignty of the state. Furthermore, it does not afEord
any safeguard against the first turning into the second. That is
why this egalitarian element needs the check of the non-rational
element of tradition and of those instruments which provide for
the influence of past decision over present decision or, negatively,
for a certain independence of political power from the present
will of the people and its representatives. That is what is meant
by the principle of political authority. The British Parliament,
the American Congress and the Swiss Nationalversammlung are
not all-powerful. They are checked by tradition and constitu-
tion, by the President, or by the Federal Government, which, at
any given moment, are independent of the present will of Parlia-
ment. This is the non-rational foundation of political authority
which, as such, is the perpetual target for the criticism of the
rationalists, who stake all their political wisdom on the principle
of equality.

4. There is, however, another feature of political life in which
the non-rational, non-egalitarian idea takes shape, namely the
federal structure of the state. Rationalism is centralistic, but
the Christian concept works toward federalism, i.e. a political
structure which is not built on the principle of mere " delegation
from the top ", but on the representative principle, or " delega-
tion from below For the rationalist, the small units are mere
organs of the central will; for the federalist, on the other hand,
the central power is a mere superstructure above more or less
autonomous small units. In centralism, the individual is faced
directly with the central power of the state, the intermediates
being mere organs of the central power. In federalism, how-
ever, there are, between the individual and the central power, a
number of semi-autonomous intermediates of different kinds,
such as local communities, cantons, corporations and trade
unions. Whilst centralism is the direct outcome of the principle
of equality, federalism is the outcome of that combination of
equality and unlikeness for which we are pleading. In the first
case the principle of the majority vote is everything; in the

126 THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE

wcond caae it is checked by the will not to admit the principle
of majority and minority at all where the major interests of a
local smaller unit are concerned. Switzerland is probably the
only country in which this non-rational principle is carried
through consistendy, and where at the same time it is combined
with the rational principle of the majority vote based on equality.
And this has been the secret of the stability of that country and
its immunity from the totalitarian germ.

IX

THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM

THE idea of freedom is not one of those which, like the
ideas of truth and justice, have stirred humanity through-
out all the ages. As a guiding idea and a basic principle
of human existence, it is the product of modem times. It is
true that within the New Testament message reference is made
to freedom, but no one would claim that this idea holds a key-
position. It will be our task to search out the reason for this.
But for the moment attention should be called to the fact that
the word freedom is used with very different meanings. Free-
dom occurs in the most different contexts, in different layers, so
to speak, of our existence. Perhaps we shall understand this
best if we start with the opposite idea, of unfreedom. Man is
unfree when he has no room to decide and shape his life. The
maximum of this unfreedom is represented by the condition of
the slave, whose whole life is in the hands of another, and who
cannot dispose either of his time or of his powers, who has to
do continuously what another forces him to do. Now this
slavery, in the old classical sense of the word, has ceased to be a
problem of our society, but it may be questioned with good
reason whether unfreedom is less acute and less dangerous when
the place of the individual slave-owner is taken by the com-
manding power of a state, which determines life and action in the
same comprehensive manner, leaving almost no room for
individual decision. The rise of totalitarian states has given the
problem of freedom a tremendous new actuality, not because it
is dictatorship, i.e. not because it prevents the individual citizen
from sharing in the decision of government, but because such a
state, whatever form it takes, controls the individual in all
sections of his life, leaving almost no sphere for private activity,

198 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

responsibility and planning, prescribing all that the individual
must do and not do, must say and not say, commanding where
he is to live and to work, and making an individual negative
utterance or decision a matter of capital punishment. In the
totalitarian state the individual, like a remotely controlled
aeroplane, is directed in all his movements by the will and
commands of the state.

We are proud, and rightly so, of our democratic freedoms.
But we are not always sufficiently conscious of the extent to
which the majority of citizens are under the dictate of another's
will, even in our free countries. It is true, they have the formal
freedom to do or not to do what they like or dislike within the
wide limits of that which the state demands and prohibits as a
minimum. But this state-free space is occupied by other direct-
ing powers ; the worker is forced to take work where it is ofEered,
he is forced to take it under the conditions which are offered to
him ; the free contract is more or less a fiction. Whoever is not
independent by reason of considerable wealth must do a multi-
mde of things which he would not do if he were not compelled
to. And he cannot do many things which he would do if he
could. Nobody eats poor food voluntarily, nobody lives in bad
houses voluntarily, very few voluntarily forgo the pleasures
which they see enjoyed by others. The power restricting a man's
will in all these cases is money. That is, the lack of money
prevents man from doing and having what he wants to do and
to have. Here, as well as in the case of the state, it is man-made
institutions that limit and narrow down the area of freedom for
the non-privileged to such an extent that the space of free
decision seems not so very much, larger than in the totalitarian
state.

There is a space, however, which no state, no social order, no
slave-owner of any kind can narrow down and that is the area
of itmer freedom. Nobody can prevent me from thinking,
believing, loving, hating, hoping and fearing as I wish. That
is why the slave, Epictetus, was able to affirm his freedom; he
had discovered the illimitable realm of inwardness, compared
with which all the external dependence, implied in his being a

IX] TWO SEPARATE PROBLEMS I2g

slave, seemed irrelevant. In a similar way the Apostle Paul

exhorted the slave members of the community of Corinth" not
to struggle to get rid of their fetters, because they were in posses-
sion of a freedom so great and lasting that, compared with it,
this outward unfreedom would seem irrelevant.

But how about this inward freedom? Are we really free to
think and to will and to judge as we want to, to give our action
the direction which we decide? Are there not also powers that
limit this inward area of freedom and perhaps reduce it to
nothing. The Bible, as you know, speaks of the slavery of sin, of
inward powers dominating man's will and driving his thought,
feeling and action in a direction against his will and which hold
him back from what he does will." Again, there is a certain
philosophy that goes even further and declares freedom to be
entirely illusory. It says that man is always like that remotely
controlled aeroplane; that his interior life, his thinking and
willing, is never free, but always determined by his nature, his
inborn character, his physical constitution, by the functioning
of his glands and the effect of the hormones. The action of
man, even if he seems to be his own lord and master, is no freer
than the trajectory of a bullet shot by a gun. Again, it is said,
man is not free in his thinking and willing because he is always
a child of his time, a product of his environment, a particle of
that historical stream in which, nolens volens, he has to swim.

In order to find our way in this perplexing multitude of facts
and conceptions of freedom, let us make an initial distinction.
There are two separate problems of freedom, quite distinct from
each other. First, how far and in what sense is man free or
unfree? Second, how far and in what sense ought man to be
free? It will be seen in our later discussion that these two
questions, utterly distinct as they are at first sight, are in close
connection with each other. At first, however, the distinction —
even the separation — of the two id necessary. The question
whether man is free, and to what degree, is answered in extremely
different ways, some of the answers affirming a perfect freedom,
the others denying any kind of freedom. The first of these
two extremes, the idealism of freedom, is a very exceptional

130 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

phenomenon compared with the second — determinism. Apart

from the philosophy of Fichte," the boldest form of liberalism —
the assertion of absolute freedom — ^has hardly ever been formu-
lated. This doctrine becomes possible only by denying the
reality of an outward world that could and would necessarily
limit freedom : because, and in so far as the self or Ego creates the
non-Ego, the outward world, it can be unconditionally free ; that
means that this Ego dr self is identified with God. On this con-
dition only can absolute freedom be affirmed. It is easily
understood that this extreme liberalism had no great chance of
becoming popular. It remains to be seen whether the renewal of
this theory of absolute freedom has any better chance in its most
recent atheistic form, in the so-called existentialism of Sartre.

The closest approximation to Fichte seems to be the Vedanta
philosophy of identity, teaching the identity of Brahma, the
One and All, with Atman, the principle of selfhood. But,
strange as it appears to us Europeans, the idea of freedom is here
completely overshadowed by the idea of being. Indian thought
is not interested in the problem of freedom at all. At the other
extreme we find determinism, the doctrine of complete un-
freedom, which — in distinction from the former doctrine — ^has
a great following, particularly in our time, even amongst those
who have never bothered much about philosophical questions,
and who would not be capable of doing so. This determinism
may be a very simple but Aoroughgoing conviction, expressed in
the phrase : Ich bin nun einmal so ! — " I cannot help being what
I am I " — a phrase whicla one can hear both from the most highly
educated as well as the simplest, and which expresses a complete
determinism. Being a self is understood entirely on the ansdogy
of objective being. Just as a lump of lead "is what it is" because
of the number of molecules and their atomic particles, so man is
determined by his constitution; his self is the sum of phycho-
logical or physical factors sCnd his designs are the resultant of the
different components as they arise from the psycho-physical
structure of man and the reciprocal action and reaction between
him and his outward world. Freedom, then, is nothing, but the
constitutionally determined possibility of reaction to the outward

IX] THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION I3I

world. Although this conception as a theory has many adber^
ents, practically it does not play a great rdle. The determinist
lives almost always as if he were not a determinist, and in his
dealings with others he presupposes that they are not determined,
but have a certain measure of freedom.

And this, whether with or without philosophical formulation,
is the view of the majority of people. Man has a certain measure
of freedom from physical heritage and constitution, from
environment and historical streams; he is a self-deciding,
responsible being. It is surprising and comforting to find how
little this untheoietical, unreasoned, and even unconscious con-
viction of freedom and responsibility is affected or shaken by
adverse theory.

The Christian conception of freedom links up with this middle
view between determinism and indeterminism. The problem
of free-will, which plays such a role in philosophy, is hardly
mentioned in the Bible. The freedom and unfreedom of man
are lifted from the theoretical field into that of practical God-
relation. The freedom of man is presupposed as a matter of
course, because, and in so far as, man is seen as always responsible
to God. Man is a subject who has to decide and to act, and is
obliged to give account for what he does. On the other hand,
man is free only in a very limited sense since he is a creature.
He is placed as an individual subject within space and time. My
space and my time are also my limits. Above all, my being
bound to a physical body reminds me of the limitation of my
freedom.

But this creaturely limitation, as such, does not infringe upon
that freedom which is essential for man, and which is primarily
realised in his responsibility before God. In being created in
God's image he has received dominion over the other creatures.
It is in this superiority over the sub-human nature, and the
physical world, that man experiences his aboriginal freedom:
" Thou hast put all things under his feet The specific
character of the Christian idea of freedom is, however, founded
in the fact that man's freedom springs from the same spot
from which comes his dependence. His freedom has its /real

I3S THE PROiBLSM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

possibility only within this dependence on God, so that the
maximum of dependence on God is the maximum of his
freedom, and that any attempt to get out of the dependence on
God leads to slavery.

For ordinary thinking — whether of a more idealistic or
materialistic, deterministic or indeterministic brand — freedom
is identical with independence. Whether this freedom is
affirmed, denied or postulated, freedom is in clear opposition to
dependence. Man is free so far as he is independent, he is un-
free so far as he is dependent. That is the axiomatic, rational
conception of freedom inherent in so-called common sense.
Either free or dependent : so far as dependence goes, freedom is
excluded; so far as freedom goes, dependence is excluded.

This common-sense idea of freedom originates in our reflection
on our relation to the world. With regard to the world and to
nature it is valid. But this conception of freedom does not grasp
the centre of personality. The centre of personality is our
relation to God. In our relation to God, however, this either /or,
which is true in relation to the world, ceases to be true and be-
comes the very opposite of truth. For in relation to God man
is the more free as he is the more dependent. Deo servire
libertas. The human self is not an entity in itself. Human
personality is what it is through its relation to God. Man is a
true self or person, and therefore he has freedom in so far as he
is not " in himself " or " by himself ", but in God, i.e. in so far
as he does not determine himself, but lets himself be determined
by God. Here, then, is the opposite of autarky or self-suffici-
ency. The more man is sufficient unto himself, the less he is
free; and the less he suffices for himself and seeks his life and
meaning in God, the freer he is.*'

In the Bible this attempt of man to withdraw himself from
God, to be sufficient unto himself and to become independent of
his Creator, is called sin. And this sin is consequently and
truthfully coimected with unfreedom or slavery. Man's attempt
to emancipate himself from God does not end merely in misery,
but in the loss of freedom. That is the meaning of the doctrine
of the fall of the first men. Adam and Eve let themselves be so

IX] DEPENDENCE ON OOD 133

hoodwioked as to seek their freedom in independence of God.
They are the prototypes of modem man ; they thought to
become free by becoming independent, by throwing off the tie
which bound them to God. They thought by doing so to
become like God, absolutely free, independent selves grounded
in themselves, and therefore having their freedom in themselves.

Man, desiring to become free in the sense of being indepen-
dent of God, confuses God and the world ; he wants to be inde-
pendent of God as he ought to be independent of the world. But
by cutting himself loose from God in order to become free,
he loses the stand from which he can be free with regard (o the
world. He loses that Archimedean fulcrum outside the world
by which he really could move the world. By cutting himself
loose from God, man precipitates himself into the world and
becomes its prisoner. Man liberated from God becomes the
slave of the world. Without his noticing it, the world becomes
his God, theoretically and practically. Theoretically, man makes
the world God by absolutising it and giving it the attributes of
divinity. Practically, he does the same thing by surrendering
himself totally to the world and what the world has to give.
" Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart " is filled with
the world, but never satisfied. The soul of man, created for God,
can never be satisfied with finite things. That is why, cut o£E
from God and lost in the world, it i$ insatiable and ever dis-
appointed. Moreover, the world attracts him with a force that
is not merely the force of sensual stimulation, but of a demonic
power, absolutised finiteness. He is not merely the slave of the
world, but the slave of the demons.

From this point we can understand the development of the
problem of freedom in the modem age. By throwing overboard
the Christian conception of freedom, two alternatives are devel-
oped — a false liberalism on the one side, a false determinism on
the other — which, in spite of their being opposites in many ways,
merge into one another. On the one hand, the conception of
freedom as independence produces a rational liberalism, which
reaches its summit in Fichte : the self is identical with God, and
this self creates the world. It is quite logical that Fichte should

134 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

see the Biblical idea of creation as the first criterion of false
philosophy and as the ori^n of metaphysical error." The self
is itself the creator — ^how should there be a creator above itf
This extreme liberalism, carrying the identification of freedom
with independence to its last consequence, was too bold to
acquire much following. A closely related idea, however,
became the starting point of one of the most powerful move-
ments of the last centilry.

At the basis of Karl Marx's system we find the idea of freedom
identified with independence. Marx teaches a kind of fall of
humanity, an initial point of the erroneous development, and a
source of all the evils from which modem society suffers. This
fatal beginning is the loss of independence, taking place, first,
within the economic reality by die division of labour, and,
second, in its ideological consequence, in the recognition of a
God. Marx formulates this axiom : " Man is free only if he
owes his existence to himself Therefore the recognition of
a God, being identical with the loss of independence, is the
beginning of unfreedom. Therefore mankind can regain its
freedom only by shaking off this double dependence, i.e. by over-
coming the capitalist division of labour through Communism
and by shaking off religion. In the classless society man owes
his existence to himself, and in atheism he becomes aware of the
fact that he owes it to himself. Therefore Communism and
atheism are linked together in the very foimdations of the
Marxist system, in the same way as capitalism is linked together
with belief in God. The abolition of capitalism is at the same
time the abolition of religion. The two are two sides of the
same process of regaining liberty, which is independence.

We find a similar idea expressed in what Nikolai Hartmann,
the Berlin philosopher, calls postulatory atheism. For the sake
of liberty the non-existence of God must be postulated, because
the acknowledgment of God is irreconcilable with independence.
Again, we find a very seductive variation of this idea in a little
work by Andrd Gide, Uenfant prodigue, in which the author
interprets the parable of the prodigal son by consciously turning
it in the opposite direction. The prodigal son was quite tight to

ix] Nietzsche's atheism 135

emancipate himself from his father; that is how he became a

free man.

More impressive than all these expressions of postulatory
atheism is that of Friedrich Nietzsche. To him also the idea of
God represents, so to speak, a fall of humanity. For it is the
belief in a God which makes possible the uprising of the weak
against the strong. The fictitious thought : " There is a God,
father of all men ", produces that slave morality of service and
paralyses the will-to-power on the part of the powerful. By the
idea of God, the Lilliputian men, the powerless herd people,
enslave and fetter the great and powerful individuals and prevent
them from doing what is, according to the true principle of life,
according to the doctrine of the will-to-power, the right thing to
do: to use their power and to dominate the weak. None has
ever expressed this postulatory atheism more bluntly than
Nietzsche's Zarathustra. " If there were Gods, who could bear
not to be a God? Therefore there are no Gods." Atheism is the
product of the will to absolute independence. It is Nietzsche
who has expressed the thought which, according to the Genesis
narrative, stirred only half<onsciously in the soul of Adam and
Eve, but was what the serpent meant by saying: Eritis sicut
deus.

False liberalism is the one, false determinism is the other line
which European thought took in cutting loose from the
Christian idea of freedom. While radical liberalism says,
" There is no God ", because there is — or there ought to be —
human freedom, radical determinism says, "There is no freedom,
because there is no God ". Radical determinism is pancausal-
ism; pancausalism is elimination of God. If there is no God,
there is only world. If there is world only, everything is deter-
mined by that category which is the very definition of the world,
causality. Because there is world only, there catmot be freedom.
Man, also, is a particle of the world, a tiny wheel in this
machinery of the world. Freedom is an illusion, because God
is an illusion. Man is an object amongst objects, a particularly
complicated object, of which the most essential element is his
brain. Man is fixed by his constitution just as a machine is

136 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

fixed by its construction. Here it becomes apparent that man is
precipitated into the world by losing his hold in God. He is
not in any degree removed from it; he is entirely submerged
in it.

Even more important than the metaphysical question of free-
dom and determinism is the ethical question about what kind of
freedom man ought to have. The history of the last few cen-
turies shows an almost uninterrupted chain of movements of
freedom or emancipation. The idea of freedom is — alongside
that of equality — ^the strongest spiritual driving force in the life
of modem Western humsuiity. The first of those movements of
liberation is a process which has rarely been seen from this
angle, namely the evolution of modem technics as the sub-
conscious attempt of man to free himself from his dependence
on nature. In a gigantic wrestling-match with the forces of
nature, man tries to become her master. This idea previously
inspired the alchemists of the time of the Renaissance human-
ism. They were seeking the philosopher's stone which would
give them magical power over the forces of nature. It is not
modem science which has produced modern technics, but it is
this will, subconscious rather than conscious, to elevate oneself
above the dependence of creaturely being which accounts for the
vehemence of the scientific as well as the technical enthusiasm of
the modem age. That is why technique so often preceded
science and showed it the way.** But it is only in the last phase
of this development that this motive came to the surface and
unveiled itself completely as technocratical pseudo-religion.
Here it becomes clear that the deepest source of this movement
is rebellion against the Creator, but a rebellion which clothes
itself in a pseudo-religious garment. The credo of this religion
is: We do not need a God any longer, since by science and
technics we have become Gods ourselves. The attribute of
omnipotence and saving power is transferred from God to
organised humanity.

On the tombstone of Benjamin Franklin we find the inscrip-
tion, more characteristic of his admirers than of himself : " He
wrested the lightning from heaven and the sceptre from the

IX] FREEDOM AND DEPENDENCE I37

tyrants". The liberation-movement of political revolution is
seen together with an emancipation-movement in the direction
of the transcendent. It is again the motive of Prometheus;
through his technical knowledge man becomes independent not
only of nature, but of deity. Whilst it was fitting for the man
of antiquity to take refuge from the whims of nature in prayer,
this seems no longer possible or worthy of the man who can split
the atom and has the unlimited secret powers of nature at his
disposal.

It is fair to add, however, that the idea of technical omnipot-
ence in our days does not so much bewitch the minds of the
masters and pioneers of science and scientific technics as it does
the younger generation and those nations for which science and
technics are comparatively new. The more mature minds have
become aware that maiikind is now in the situation of the
Sorcerer's Apprentice of Goethe, who by the stolen magic word
of his master forced into his service the slave-spirits, but could
not really rule them, so that he finally found himself in great
danger of being ruined by their very service. There are many
amongst the scientific masters of our time who confess with no
little apprehension that technical knowledge has outgrown the
control of man and that it is no more a serviceable spirit, but
has become a master dangerous to life. Why is that the case?
Because man has developed his life on the lines of emancipation
from God, in the foolish belief that freedom is independence,
and now learns from bitter experience, what he could have
known from the Bible, that this independence is not freedom
but slavery, endangering his life.

We can see equally clearly the same thing at work in the
liberation-movements taking place in the sphere of political and
social life. When modem man speaks of liberty, he first of all
thinks of political and social freedom. Now, in the Christian
conception of human life, there is a marvellous balance of free-
dom and dependence in human relation, because freedom and
dependence are already tied together in the root of man's
personal existence, in his relation to God.** Truly, man is
called by God to freedom. He who is a servant of God is a free

138 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

man amongst men. The Creator has made man free; slavery
is a negation of God's order of creation. The unconditional
commandment of love protects everyone from the claim to
dominion on the part of the others. Equal dignity includes
equal freedom. But now you will remember that in the
Christian conception of man there is founded not only this equal
dignity, from which mumal independence derives, but also
unlikeness, from which mutual dependence follows. Man is
not created only for freedom but also for community, and not
only for the free community of love, but also for functional
interdependence, which is based on the principle of supplementa-
tion and the structural subordination of each individual within
a functional unit. The Biblical principle of life does not
establish autarky but mutual giving and receiving; not the
individualistic existence of Robinson Crusoe, but marriage,
family, neighbourly community and political solidarity.

Now, in this functional unity there is always a subordination
alongside equal dignity. The one must be above, the other
below; the one must lead, the other obey. Wherever men have
to do something together, there must be a hierarchy of compet-
ence, of command ; where this is not recognised, the co-operative
unit falls to pieces. This hierarchy is also an order of creation,
but it must be distinguished most strictly from that kind of
hierarchy which includes inequality of dignity and of freedom.
Tbis funaional order of co-operation is, however, always falsified
by man's egoism, which transforms functional structure and
service into some kind of caste-system or class-rule, enslaving and
degrading large parts of mankind. In order to increase the
power and profit of the privileged, a false system of authority is
erected which destroys liberty. This was the situation at the
begiiming of the modem era. The liberation-movement had as
its purpose and legitimate aim to destroy this false order of
authority, as it was incorporated in feudalism and in the ecclesi-
astical hierarchy. The battle had to be fought in the name of
God-given freedom. But the fact that this batde was also to be
fought against a false Church authority gave rise to the deep mis-
understanding that a battle had to be fought against the

IX] AUTHORITY DISCREDITED I39

authority of God as such. The rationalist interpretation of

equality implied suspicion of any kind of authority and pro-
fessed that any kind of subordination was contrary to human
dignity and freedom. The very concept of authority was
discredited in the name of freedom. It was by this misunder-
standing that the idea of freedom became the lever of the
anarchical destruction of society.

Within this process we have to distinguish three phases. In
the first, liberalism of the idealistic type still recognised a certain
transcendent root of human dignity, and therefore a certain
divine authority, the authority of a categorical imperative or
moral law. But this authority was uncertain because, by the
principle of autonomy, this moral law was interpreted as our
own law, and therefore real dependence and authority were not
acknowledged as they are implied in the faith in a creator.
Moral law was interpreted in such a way that the idea of autho-
rity vanished in the light of the idea of freedom.*' While the
authority of a transcendent power thus becomes uncertain, the
idea of authority among men disappears altogether. There is
no further place for that natural interdependence forming
structural units. All community is understood merely as
society. Authority among men is merely provided for in the
attenuated form of " administration ", as it is grounded in the
idea that the freedom of the one has to be limited by the freedom
of the other. This is the idea of the contrat social of which we
spoke in the last lecture. Contractual association is substituted
for original community. Authority is merely the delegation of
individual rights. Government becomes administration which
has to execute the will of the sovereign people, whether good or
evil, and this, again, is justified by the assumption that the will
of the people is always good.

In the second phase even the transcendental element which
remained within idealism, namely the divine moral law,
disappears. There is no more moral authority, there is only
freedom without authority. The attempt is now made to con-
struct society and state on the principle of freedom alone, in
such a way diat all social order and rule is considered as a mere

J40 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM [lECT.

measure of utility. This is the condition of laissez faire, of the
utmost possible limitation and progressive diminution of legal
authority, the proclamation of free love superseding the
out-moded institution of marriage.

The third phase is a reaction against the anarchical state of
society into which laissez faire liberalism had thrown it. It has
become apparent that society cannot exist without authority
holding it together. But no authority of a spiritual character is
left — neither that of a moral law, nor that of God. One has to
create an authority of a bluntly de facto character, the authority
of the one who has the power, i.e. dictatorship on a purely
naturalistic basis. It is evident that this dictatorship is irrecon-
cilable with those rights of man that were proclaimed in previous
centuries, because these rights would make this de facto authority
uncertain and might destroy it. Therefore this very freedom
has to be attacked and it is attacked, not always quite without
reason, as individualistic and a danger to society. The totali-
tarian state despises, ridicules and discredits liberal democracy,
basing its criticism on the shortcomings inherent in individual-
istic liberalism. Individual freedom disappears in the collectivist
totalitarian state, which is erected not on a moral foundation but
on sheer power. And this, so far, is the end of those modem
movements of liberation in which freedom was imderstood as
independence, and which could not but fulfil the warning word
that the Creator spoke to Adam: "For in the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die ".

We said in the beginning that the idea of freedom is not at
the centre of Biblical revelation. Freedom, rightly understood,
is not the first, but a second word. The first word is dependence
on God, God's lordship. First comes God's gift and will. God
gives freedom to man in binding him to Himself. Man's free-
dom is identical with his dependence on God : " If the Son there-
fore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed "." "Where
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty I " " It was the tragic
error of modem humanity to seek a freedom outside of and in
independence of God. This way could not but lead into the
opposite, into slavery, be it slavery to the world or slavery under
man's dominion.

IX] THE UNGONDITIONAL FOUNDATION I4I

Where freedom is not sought m independence, but in depend-
ence on God, there the mastery over things will not lead to
obsession by the things of the world or by technical powers;
there the freedom of the individual will not produce the dissolu-
tion of community ; there the structural hierarchy of competence
based on unlikeness will not lead to an authoritarian caste-
system or class-dominion; there individual freedom and social
cohesion will be balanced, because the recognition of equal
dignity is combined with a functional aristocracy, the freedom
of the individual and the interest of the community being
equally recognised.

Let us remember, however, with reference to freedom, what
has been said in previous connections : that the false directions
of the emancipation-movements of modem times had their
origin not merely in the rebellion against divine authority, but
also in the legitimate rebellion against false authority, for which
empirical Christianity was responsible either indirectly or
directly. Not only had the Church sanctioned the misuse of
authority by the political and economic powers, but it had itself
created a clerical system of false authority and in its orthodoxy
false spiritual authorities, which in the long run were insupport-
able. Therefore Christianity still faces the task of interpreting
the Christian message in such a way that freedom of the
individual, as well as the order of society, is grounded in
unconditional dependence' on God.

X

THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY

ALL culture lives by the creative powers of the human
inind. For culture is that which man does beyond
^biological necessity. It is the sum of the new things
which nature does not and cannot furnish. This creative power
— ^talent or, at its maximum, genius — is in itself something
bestowed. Man cannot produce talent or genius. Talent or
genius cannot be made by education. Either you have this
power or you do not have it. Education, training, schooling of
any kind may assist the talent, and the lack of these or odier
unfavourable conditions may hinder or even destroy the creative
powers ; but in themselves they are, as the word genius indicates,
given by birth. You cannot decide to be or to become a genius;
either you are one by birth, or you will never be. This factor,
then — ^the factor of creative power, talent or genius — ^belongs to
those nature-given elements of civilisation or culture which from
the beginning we have been leaving out of our consideration.

Two things, however, lie decidedly within the range of our
interest, i.e. within that area where religious faith or unbelief
becomes relevant. F^st, the direction which is given to the use
of these creative powers ; and second, the place and rank which
is given to them within our whole system of values and our con-
ception of the meaning of human existence at large. By being
a Christian, or a pagan, or an atheist, one does not become a
person of greater or smaller talent. Faith, unbelief, a world-
outlook on this or that order neither enhances nor diminishes
genius. But certainly the fact of being a Christian or a non-
Christian, a true believer or an atheist, expresses itself in
the direction which creativity takes. And further, faith or
unbelief, world-outlook of any kind, must and will emerge in

BARLY MISGIVINGS 143

very different conceptions and evaluations of the creative
element within the totality of human life. These, then, are the
two problems with which we have to deal in trying to grasp the
relations between Christian faith and cultural life.

It is only in a comparatively late phase of the evolution of the
human mind that man becomes conscious of his creative powers.
At first, and for a long while, it is only his physical creativity
which attracts his interest. In the Phallus^ and Lingam-cult
he venerates his sexual creativity as a divine power. Later on,
it is the formation of the state and legislation in which he sees
the manifestation of supernatural divine forces. Again, in a
later stage, he becomes conscious of the different r^in;, the crafts
and arts, the use of fire, the handling of metals, agriculture, and
finally the liberal arts, as being expressions of specifically human
nature, of his creative powers.

But now it is striking and most significant that the evaluation
of this cultural creativity is not naively positive, but reflected
and complex. The myth of Prometheus is a characteristic
expression of this complex view. Certainly Prometheus, the
titanic hero who taught men the crafts and arts and brought
them the fire from heaven out of compassion, is a benefactor,
but at the same time he is a rebel against a divine order. He
had to steal the fire from the gods and for that underwent
terrible punishment. That is, according to this view the rise of
the creative capacity of man is looked at somehow suspiciously,
as if there were something unlawful about it. It is somehow a
product of usurpation. Although man is delighted to have all
these faculties, he is still conscious of a tension which, because
he has them, exists between creative man and the divine order.
A similar feeling seems to be expressed in Germanic mythology,
whereit is the dark demi-gods of the underworld who possess the
secret of technical arts and from whom man acquires his know-
ledge. Again, a similar idea glimmers through the oldest
tradition of Old Testament history. Cain is distinguished from
Abel, the mild shepherd, as the offensive cultivator, who cannot
please God. In the Genesis story of die Fall there is discover-
able a remnant of an older tradition, probably a Babylonian idea.

144 THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [LEGT.

that the acquirement of knowledge is a sacrilege against divine
property, severely punished by God. And even the present
veiiion of the story of the Fall emphasises that there is a limit
set by God to man's knowledge.

But, above all, it is the story of the Tower of Babel which is
most significant for our problem. Men have united in order to
make a name for themselves, they want to build a city to keep
them together and make them powerful, they want to build a
tower whose top " may reach unto heaven ". But God steps in
and prevents them from perfecting their tower by confounding
their language. In this stupendous symbol of timeless validity a
number of elements are united. The creative power and activity
of man, represented by architecture, at one and the same time
expresses his will to make a name for himself, to acquire fame,
and also his unsuccessful attempt to keep human society
together by co-operative action. In the third place, and most
significantly, this creative ability expresses man's tendency to
withdraw himself from the divine power and to exalt himself
into the divine heights.

It would, however, be one-sided and even false if we thought
that this was all that the Bible has to say about the creativity of
man. As a matter of fact, the Bible i(eckons quite naturally
with this cultural or civilising capacity and activity of man, but
without placing any specific accent on it. These creative powers
are gifts of God and therefore good. Only their misuse is bad.
I think it is legitimate to interpret the parable of the talents
(from which our use of the word talent comes) as meaning that
man is responsible before God for this as well as for all other
gifts which he has received from his Creator, and that he is
bound to use them in such a way that the Lord can acknowledge
the service of the servant as faithful. But it is true that the
interest of the Bible, in the New Testament as well as in the Old
Testament, never dwells on these creative elements as such, but
is entirely directed to the ceptral ^qtiye of all this and any other
natural activity : " Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or what-
soever ye do, do all to the glory of God

It is difficult to say whether this motive of the subordination

X] CULTURE SUBORDINATE TO OOD I45

of all human activity to the honour of God has been stimulating
or has had the opposite effect within the sphere of Western
humanity. But there cannot be the least doubt that this
motivation has been a directing force of creativity in the highest
degree. The history of culture in the early Christian, in the
mediaeval, in the Beformation and post-Reformation times is
one great proof of that thesis. All cultural activity, art and,
science, music and poetry, applied arts, as well as social institu-
tions, the state, the law, the organisation of economic life,
customs of civic life, in short everything capable of carrying the
imprint of the human mind, has been brought, at least theoreti-
cally and symbolically, under this highest category : deo gloria,
deo servitium. It is true that this deo gloria was understood all
too often in a narrow, clerical or ecclesiastical sense, and that for
centuries the Virgin or the angels and the saints overshadowed
God's glory. But within these limitations the European life of
these twelve or thirteen centuries, from Constantine to the time
of the Enlightenment, is the great example of a civilisation which
is dominated by the idea that all human creativity and action
ought to be a service of God. ,

Now, this positive relation between faith and culture is not
the only one. There is also the phenomenon of Anchoritism
with its radical denial of culture or civilised life. There is the
monastic movement which, particularly in its several initial
phases, was highly critical of culture, even to the extent of radical
denial. There are also the different sectarian movements that
show a tendency toward withdrawal from the complexities of
the cultural life into the so<alled "simple life". There is
Puritanism with its distinctively narrow cultural interest and its
mistrust of many forms of art and cultural life. There is the
pietistic movement with its semi-ascetic outlook. Furthermore,
one caimot deny that in all these movements there is expressing
itself a genuinely Christian motive, a critical standing aloof from
an all too optimistic identification of the spiritual and the
cultural. This critical line must certainly be included in any
discussion of the relation between Christian faith and cultural
activity. But two things must be observed.

146 THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [LECT.

First, in most of these movements we can discover, apart firom
Christian faith, another religious force which is primarily respon-
sible for this negative attitude, namely Neoplatonic mysticism,
within which there is inherent a dualistic metaphysics that has
ascetism as its practical outgrowth. Second, we should not
deny that apart from the Anchorite movement, which can
hardly be called genuinely Christian, all the other movements,
whilst critical in some parts, are most positive with regard to
some other features of human civilisation. We should not forget
what the Benedictines have done for the transmission of the
heritage of ancient classical culture. We cannot pass over the
magnificent architecture of one of the most radical and austere
monastic movements, that of Cluny. We have to acknowledge
with the highest praise the humanistic and scientific zeal of
Puritanism, the dignified style of middle-class architecture within
the Moravian community, and so forth.

Furthermore, in this connection it is necessary to reject the
wide-spread misunderstanding with regard to the cultural effects
of the Reformation. Certainly the iconoclasm which resulted
in some parts of the world from Reformation preaching, and the
abolition of the cult of the Virgin and the saints, have to a con-
siderable extent narrowed the range of ecclesiastical art.

The Reformation and the Puritan movements must not,
however, be identified. Neither is the intensity of a Christian
culture to be measured by the extent of art employed in the
service of the organised Church. We should never forget that
it was within the realm of the early Lutheran Church that one
of the greatest cultural creations took place in the shape of
German church music, from Martin Luther to Johann Sebastian
Bach, and that it was on the soil of Calvinistic Holland that a
development of painting took place, equal to that of the Italian
Renaissance, and reaching in Rembrandt one of those highest
pinnacles of art where only a few names are inscribed. Further-
more, it should not be forgotten th'at Rembrandt is a painter
who increasingly made the interpretation of Biblical history his
main artistic endeavour, just as Bach throughout his life had
put his incomparable musical genius in the service of the divine

X] ANONYMOUS CREATIVITY I47

Word and often expressed his conception of music as bdng
nothing but an attempt of man to glorify God.

These examples of creativity being subordinated to a truly
Christian view of life in the post-Reformation era have their
parallels in other fields : in poetry, in natural science, in scholar-
ship, not forgetting the economic and political spheres. Names
like those of Johannes Kepler, Hugo Grotius, John Milton,
William the Silent of Orange, and, above all, the large share of
Calvinistic theology in the formation of democratic institutions
may be sufficient to prove that, where Luther's and Calvin's
interpretation of the Christian message had been accepteci in
living faith, the creative mind nevec felt, itself hampered, but
rather directed and even stimulated by that faith.

It can easily be understood that the progressive emancipation
from Christianity which took place in the modem world also
expressed itself in a different evaluation of creativity. We can
trace this new temper back to the Renaissance. From then
onwards the bright light of fame is directed on the creative
individual as never before. Let us not forget that creativity is
something relative and differential ; even the average man has a
certain measure of creadvity, modest as it may be; every one
gives his personal stamp to his life, his surroundings, to his house.
Creativity ranges from a minimum to a maximum. This
maximum we call genius. While in the time when creativity
was subordinated to the religious meaning of life this difference
was not accentuated and even the highest genius remained
anonymous, now this differential character of creadvity becomes
important, and the creative talent or genius sees to it that the
artificer's name is connected with his work. The epoch of fame
is beginning; or, to be more exact, the epoch in which fame is
not reserved for great generals and statesmen, but becomes
something taken for granted within the spheres of art, science
and scholarship. It is the time when Vasari writes his lexicon
of famous jainters.

In that, as in many other respects, the Renaissance is indeed a
renascence of Greco-Roman antiquity. We have seen already, in
previous connections, how important a role the fame of the

148 THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [lECT.

creative genius plays in the development of> the idea of person-
ality. But there is still a difEerence. In Greece the creative
individual remained in the first place a member of his people, a
citizen of his polis. With the beginning of the modem era the
meaning of individual fame becomes different. The 1500 years
of Christian history had produced a sense of individual person-
ality unknown to antiquity. The individual has an eternal
destiny as an individual. This Christian personalism lies
between antiquity and the modem epoch. But since the Renais-
sance a thoroughgoing transformation has taken place. It is
no longer man as such, but it is the creative individual upon
whom this supreme accent is placed. The creative individual
steps out of the general crowd and is illuminated by a spptlight
of hitherto unparalleled intensity. The names of the great
masters are spread abroad over the whole world and their fame
is cherished with the greatest solicitude. In the realm of liberal
art, but even more in that of science, the rivalry of great men is
the order of the day, not seldom taking the ugly form of disputes
about priority. To be a man, a human being, is something;
but to be a famous, eminent, creative man is nmch more.

This is only one aspect of the rising importance attached to
creativity. More and more the creative element becomes the
supreme criterion of that which characterises man as man, the
human as human. The development of the creative individual-
ity becomes the guiding principle of education. Rousseau's
Emile is educated in solitude in order to preserve his original
individuality and to keep it from being spoiled by the conven-
tionalities of society. Originality, elemental primitivity, in-
dividuality a tout prix becomes the slogan. The hero worship
of great individuals becomes a feature of our modem life. As
mediaeval man made his pilgrimage to some sacred place where
the bones of a sdnt were buried, modem man makes his pilgrim-
age to the spot where the great poets or scientists lived or died ;
mausoleums of great geniuses are built where everything con-
cerning that person, his life and activity can be seen. The
biographical material conceming the great poets, musicians,
thinkers, artists, becomes immense. The smallest detail of the

X] THE WORSHIP OF GENIUS 149

life of Goethe is piously registered and preserved. It is parti-
cularly in the epoch of Romanticism that the veneration of
genius reaches its maximum. According to Schelling, it is the
creative mind, the work of the genius, in which the divine
creativity of nature, identical with God-head, reaches its cul-
minating point. In the creative work of the genius " the holy,
etemally<reating diyine power of the world which engenders all
things"** breaks forth. Creative genius is the highest mani-
festation of creative deity. The man of genius, so we read in
the book of a late Romantic philosopher, is a happy solution of
the tragedy of human history.** Genius is the manifestation
of the world-spirit. " Music is a higher revelation than all
wisdom and philosophy," says Beethoven.

Whilst this metaphysical interpretation of genius has become
rare in our days, we are certainly affected by that change within
the hierarchy of values according to which human creatii^ty,
talent and genius takes the highest place and is the measure
and criterion of human value. The man of genius may do
■whit he likes, whatever seems necessary to his productive work;
genius is an excuse for everything. To apply moral standards
to the man of genius appears as a sign of the narrowmindedness
of commonplace people. For the creative genius there exists
a special decalogue, the first commandment of whidi is: I am
creative, therefore I can do what I find good. Here we have a
kind of Nietzschean power-morality. Morality may be good
for the large masses, but for the great, exceptional man it
has no validity. As a matter of fact, Nietzsche's aristocratic
doctrine of the superman has its origin just as much in this }
Romantic veneration of genius as in a naturalistic conception of
political power. One merges into the other, one helps the other.
But it is not morality alone which is devaluated, but also
religion. One who is himself a god needs no religion; he is
divine in himself. He must not bow his head. Creativity takes
the place of the religious element. Is it not this which is
expressed in Goethe's sentence : " Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst
besitzt, der hat Religion; wer sie nicht besitzt, der habe
Religion ? " The creative spirit is a substitute for religion as well

150 .THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [LECT.

as fo^ morality. Produaivity becomes in itself the meaning

and principle of life.

This shift in the order of values could not fail to produce fatal
results. I would recall here what we said earlier, that culture
viewed from the standpoint of creativity, as well as creativity
• itself, is primarily a formal phenomenon. Creativity, as such,
Ais indifEerent to content; it can manifest itself in any content.
If the work is original, creative, a work of genius, its content is
unimportant. The famous pear of Manet is Grst-class painting
just as much as Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine. Creative
genius can manifest itself just as well in a ballet-dancer of Degas
as in Rembrandt's engravings on the parable of the prodigal son.
Incontestable as this is, this dissociation of the creative element
from content indicates a fatal development. Creativity which
follows its ovm logic of formalism, and therefore despises any
reference to content, more and more loses content and becomes a
trifling formalism. Certainly we believe in the full artistic
earnestness of Manet painting his pear or of Goya painting his
famous piece of raw meat. Both are works of the first rank,
filling everyone who is sensitive to painting with delight and
admiration; and yet everyone who has not succumbed to the
cult of genius, in enjoying these masterpieces will be worried by
the question : Where does this lead ; must not this kind of art
end in purest abstraction, in lifeless formalism?
This is not the only indication of cbming decay. Once the
y hta^f is established that productivity is the meaning of human
I life, none can prevent this point of view being transferred to the
lower regions of human production, especially since it is only a
minority of people who are capable of taking part actively or
receptively in art and science, at least in the sense of a passionate
interest or a total self-abandonment. The slogan of productivity
being the true meaning of life directs the large majority of men
to another field, a field of production which is in closer connec-
tion with every-day exigencies and interests, namely the field of
mechanical or technical invention in the service of economic
production.

It corresponds to a materialist, quantitative conception of life.

X] A WARNING OF DECAY I5I

by which the technical inventor becomes the adored 83rmbol of
creativity, and new machinery the measure of progress. Edison
is thought of as the greatest of creative minds. It is in this
sphere of technical invention that man enters, so to speak, into
human competition with the Creator of nature. By architecture
and technics he produces a man-made world, an artificial nature,
somehow re-surfacing and effectively hiding nature. It is here
that the motive of the Tower of Babel story is most apparent.
Man-creator, competitor of God-creator. Certainly technics and
building are first of all very matter-of-fact useful things. The
multi-millionaiie building titanic skyscrapers is, as a rule, no
romantic but a realist who calculates exactly how much this
building is going to bring in in dollars and cents. Furthermore,
his skyscraper is a form of architecture produced by the high
cost of city property and the scarcity of space. But, all the same,
it is in these architectural structures that something of that
dangerous titanism finds expression, which the narrative of the
Tower of Babel has in mind. It is, perhaps, not so much the
builders as individuals, but the generation which sees these
colossi rise from the ground and sees also the greatest rivers
bridged, the Atlantic ocean crossed in a day's flight and the city
of Hiroshima destroyed by a single bomb— it is this generation
which is tempted with a feeling of God-like power. •

No doubt, in all that man does he is fundamentally and in
many ways dependent on the work of the Divine Creator. It
is from nature that he gets his material and often also, without
knowing it, the guiding ideas of his production. He can never
free himself from the laws of statics and dynamics, but has to
adapt himself to them. However, there is a great temptation to
forget in the case of his own creations his dependence on that
which God creates and to feel himself in his creativity as creator
of his own existence. " Man is free only if he owes his existence
to himself," we heard Karl Marx saying. The more man lives
in his artificial man-made reality amongst man's structures and
machinery, the more strongly he receives the impression that he
is the creator of his own existence. It is no accident that this is
the statement of Karl Marx, i.e. of a man who saw man only as
an economic producer.

152 THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [lECT.

This does not mean that technics or productivity inevitably
estrange man from God. Even the most creative mind, and even
the man who has to live entirely among machinery and within
a man-made surroimding, can remain God-conscious and can do
whatever he does for the glory of God. Human creativity and the
man-made reality is not the reason or cause, but it is the great
temptation to Godlessness. The more creative man is, the more
he is tempted to confound himself with the Creator. The
danger is the titanism of the creative man who, inebriated by his
feeling of creativity and in a kind of mystic ecstasy, thinks him-
self to be God. It is that old phenomenon of Sppis, of man's
forgetting his limits, which brings him to ruin.

Thus far we have been speaking of creativity as such. But
the detachment from the Christian faith, as we see it taking place
in the modem world, has its results also in the relation of the
different spheres in which man is productive. The phenomenon
we are now dealing with is the tendency to autonomy of culture
and civilisation. Modem man, determined to free human
civilisation from the tutelage of the Church, thinks it necessary
for that purpose to emancipate it also from the predominance of
the Christian revelation, and hence proclaims a programme of
autonomy. This is the decisive step in the direction of seculari-
sation, of this-worldliness. The roots of culture that lie in the
transcendent sphere are cut off; culture and civilisation must
have their law and meaning in themselves.

Now, what makes this problem particularly difficult is the
fact that, beyond all doubt, every domain of human culture and
civilisation does have its own immanent law. Every science,
like mathematics, has its own principles, norms and criteria,
which certainly cannot and must not be leamed from divine
revelation, but are immanent in the subject matter, and must be
leamed by entering into it. The same is true of every art, every
technique, whether it be the liberal arts, the technical arts, or
the arts of politics and economics. In each of these fields expert
knowledge is necessary, and this expert knowledge is the same
for everyone, whether Christian or non-Christian. Even the
good Samaritan, who cares for the man fallen among thieves,

X] LIBERATION FROM TUTELAGE 153

has to do it with expert knowledge that does not come from
Christian love, but from practical experience. Faith and love
do not make expert knowledge superfluous. In the good
Samaritan they worked together without any conflict. It is love ^
which is the inspiration of expert activity. There is a technique
of good Samaritanship which he who earnestly loves wants to
learn and to apply. The principle, then, of the autonomy of the
sciences and arts is based on truth. But it is only half the truth.

It is no longer a half truth but a fatal error if such an auton-
omy is understood to mean something that stands upon itself
and calls for no subordination, no fitting into a higher unity.
The best Samaritan-technique is no use if love, the will to help,
does not move man to use it. The detachment of culture from
Christianity produced the fatally erroneous belief that culture
or creativity needs no subordination to a higher unit, but can
live on its own resources. The vehemence with which the
so-called Christian tutelage of culture is rejected is not in-
comprehensible, considering how intolerably in past centuries
Christianity has fettered culture. This is particularly obvious
in the field of science. The narrow borderlines in which Church
dogma kept scientific endeavour hampered scientific develop-
ment for centuries. No wonder that the liberation of science
from this theological tutelage took place in a violent manner,
revealing a deep resentment which lingers on to the present day.
It was philosophy that led the way and cut the ice; the sciences,
the arts, developments in economic and political thought
followed. The tendency is the same everywhere : freedom from
ecclesiastical, theological and Christian presuppositions —
autonomy!

This postulate of autonomy in its unconditional sense dqes not
take account of a most important fact, namely the unity of
human life. There is a totalitarian charaaer in the questions,
what for? what is the meaning? Meaning, as we have seen in a
previous lecture, is totality. All domains of human life must be
brought into the unity of meaning in order to be meaningful.
This unity of meaning does not lie in any one of them as such;
the unity of meaning lies only in that principle in which the

154 THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [LECT.

totality of man and nature is grounded, i.e. the divine will. In
the first centuries of the modem age the spiritual leaders still
knew that; they did not want to emancipate civilisation from
God, but only from the Church and also from the specifically
Christian form of religion. They did not want to abandon
theology as the basis of civilisation, but they were seeking a
rational or natural theology. It was only in the course of time
that it became clear that such a natural theology, offering a solid
basis apart from Christian revelation, does not exist. Each
philosophical school produced its own " rational theology and
the metaphysical chaos finally became so great that the quest for
a theological basis was deserted altogether. It was then that the
] programme of the autonomy of civilisation was understood in a
radical, in an entirely secular sense. What was the consequence?
h First, that the different domains fell asunder. The new age
experienced the departmentalisation of cultural life. Science
developed itself independendy alongside art; so did the arts,
economic life and the state. The programme involved in the
autonomy of civilisation produced a necessarily disconnected
specialisation. But this was only the outward appearance of a
more fundamental change: each domain gradually lost its
meaning. According to the postulate of autonomy, the meaning
of science, of art, of economics, of politics was sought, each in
itself alone. But meaning being totality, the postulate of auton-
omy had resulted in each one of these domains trying to be the
totality in itself. It is in this manner that the different " isms
were created : " intellectualism " as the scientific totalitarianism,
" aestheticism " as the totalitarianism of art, " economism ", and
finally political totalitarianism, as the most dangerous of all
these.

Intellectualism and aestheticism still have a spiritual heritage
and basis. Intellectualism is based on the total claim of science.
Now, since science is a great spiritual good, the fatal consequences
of its false autonomy, of the totalitarianism of science, do not
appear so quickly. On the other hand, science is the domain in
which specialisation proceeds most rapidly. With its tremend-
ous specialisation during recent centuries, it became difficult to

X] AESTHETIC TOTALITARIANISM I55

sec a meaning any one of these sciences. Furthermore,
scientific activity is based so entirely on one of our spiritual
functions only, namely intelligence, that the progressive im-
poverishment and deformation of the human soul could not but
appear most drastically. And, finally, it became clear 'in the
progress of science that science, as such, is incapable of giving
life a meaning. For science never declares what ought to be, but
only what is. Science only describes and explains &cts, it has
no access to meaning.

.^stheticism in many ways had a better chance, for art has
such a manifold claim on the mind and soul of man, and it can
move the depth of his heart in such a measure that the destruc-
tive effect of its totalitarian claim does not easily appear. Art
has never undergone such a process of specialisation as science.
But asstheticism produced evils of its own. First of all, only a
small minority of people were capable of believing that art
could be the meaning of life, because the world of art is so
detached from the problems of practical everyday affairs.
Furthermore, the more art proclaimed its autonomy in the prin-
ciple " art for art's sake " and so detached itself from the rest of
life, the more empty it became. The separation of content and
form, which was the necessary result of this autonomy, could not
but manifest itself in an extreme formalism, and therefore a pro-
gressive impoverishment. Finally, aestheticism as a philosophy
of life inevitably leads to moral and social anarchy and chaos.
Is not this one of the roots of the weakness of France, that |
country which more than any other was inclined to follow the
doctrines of aestheticism?

Much more obvious and brutal is the efEect of totalitarianism
in the range of economics and politics. The emancipation of
economic life led to that typical release of the economic motive
which is so characteristic of the Western world in the 19th and
20th centuries, particularly in the countries with a predomin-
antly Germanic and Anglo-Saxon population. It is not only the
mentality which we are wont to connect with the capitalistic
system " and with " Manchester liberalism ", but also the
reaction against it in Marxian pan-economism, which is a dear

156 THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY [LECT.

manifestation of this evolution. Marxism and capitalism are
twin brothers, children of the same economic totalitarianism
which, having got hold of Western man within recent genera-
tions, has so deeply damaged, brutalised and impoverished
Western society. The devastations of the soul and the
deformity of human life produced by capitalist and Marxist
pan-economism are indescribable.

Still, they are surpassed by what political totalitarianism has
done to us since the formation of totalitarian states began in
1917. What we nowadays call totalitarianism is but one of the
forms of the totalitarian principle. It is the application of this
principle to the state and to politics. It is necessary to see
political totalitarianism in this larger context. It is pne of the
inevitable products of the principle of autonomy. But it is also
the one in which the falsehood of that principle becomes most
manifest. It is even more dangerous than all the other totali-
tarianisms, because of an element connected with it alone, the
element of compulsion. The aesthete, seeing the meaning of life
in art, does that on his own account; he can force no one else to
share his error. The totalitarian state, however, possesses both
the will and the power to force everyone to live as if the state were
the meaning of life, as if the state had that all-importance which
belongs to God alone. But when we think of this monster, the
totalitarian state, we should never forget whose child it is : it is
Kthe product of that programme of autonomy which was formu-
( lated as a consequence of the attempt to emancipate culture from
Christian faith.- If this principle of autonomy and totality is
taken up by the state, that state at once dainu — and claims
effectively — ^the monopoly of totalitarianism. The totalitarian
state does away with those rival pseudo-religions, intellectualism
and aestheticism, just as it tries to do away with its most danger-
ous rival, true religion, in order to establish itself as the
only acknowledged and effective religion, the pseudo-religion of
political totalitarianism. The economic element, however, even
a totalitarian economism, it incorporates in itself, creating the
conditions which you may call totalitarian state-socialism or
state-capitalism, as you please. And this is the end not only of

X] INTIORATION THROUGH OOD I57

freedom and humanity, but also of all true creativity. 'For
spiritual creativity and collectiyist tyranny are mutually
exclusive.

Man cannot tear out of his life that unity which is in God
alone without the gravest consequences. If he does so, the
consequence is the proclamation of autonomy and the totali-
tarianism of the di£erent domains. But in the competition
between these different totalitarianisms the political makes a
prey of all the others, because it alone has the power of coercion,
the power to prohibit and to annihilate what it does not like. It
replaces arguments and the free competition of spiritual forces
by machine-guns and concentration camps. In such a fashion
it destroys all creative life, the brutal automaton of power
triumphing over the creative spirit.

Let us once more come back to the creative man as he is seen
within the Christian faith. God, the Creator, having created
man in His image, has given him creative powers ; where man
acknowledges his Creator, he knows that he cannot create from
nothing as God does, that therefore his human creativity is a |
mere imitation of God's, taking place within the limits and
according to the laws and dependent upon the materials which
God gives. Where God is acknowledged as the Creatof, man
knows that the ultimate meaning of His creatures is the same as
the meaning of all life : the glory of God and the service of men.
If he remains within this boundary every domain of human
activity keeps its own rights and its own kind. Moreover, each
one then keeps within its limits. This is particularly true, and
particularly important, in regard to the most dangerous of them
all, the state, which is then placed under the control of the divine
law and kept within the limits of its functions. The state is thus
only a servant and not a master of human life. Its so-called
sovereignty is strictly limited by the God-given purpose of the
state, and the " sovereignty " of the individual states is limited
by the equal rights of every other " sovereign " state. That is
to say, the dangerous principle of sovereignty is limited by the |
sovereignty of God, both internally and externally, and thereby
a due relation is maintained.

158 THE PROBLEM QF CREATIVITY

Where the principle of autonomy is substituted for faith in

the Creator, this unity and order in human life fall to pieces,
and finally the state, as the substimted unifier, usurps the rights
of all and plays the rdle of God on earth. It can do so more
effectively when it is combined with pan-economism and techno-
cracy. It is then that man, identifying himself with that state,
can believe himself to be God, the creator of his own existence,
having in his hands unlimited powers and illimitable authority
over other men. This totalitarian man is, in all probability, the
monster of the Apocalypse who tramples down and devours
humanity. And the totalitarian state is the most urgent
problem of our civilisation at this present hour.

For it is precisely in this present generation that it should
become obvious where the de-Ghristianisation of culture and
civilisation — ^the main feamre of the past few centuries — ^leads.
Humanity therefore is facing in our time, as at no time before,
this alternative: either to continue along this road of the
modem age, the road of emancipation from the Christian truth
which leads to the total effacement of anything truly human and
perhaps even to its complete physical aimihilation ; or to go back
to the source of justice, truth and love, which is the God of
justice, truth and love in whom only lies the power of salvadon.

\

NOTES AND REFERENCES

* Oswald Spenoler, 7%« Decline of the West. .
•Jakob Burckhardt, Brief e an Preen (34.7.1889).

* HuYZiNGA, Im Schatten von morgen.

* Of course there has remained in many of the Eurojpean countries
a good deal of Christian tradition as well as a considerable stock
of truly idealist diought. But the main trend was in the opposite

direction.

'QT. John Baillie, Riddell Lectures, 1945, What is Christian
Civilisation? to which I am greatly indebted.

* Albert Schweizer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu — Forschung.

Even if we give more weight to the ancient traditions aboul
Plato's connections with the wisdom of the Orient than has been
customary in recent times, as J. Bidez has pleaded for in his Gifford
Lectures {Eos ou Platon et V orient, 1945), we can see no trace of any
influence from the side of Hebrew prophetic sources. Whether
this would also be true with regard to Hellenistic philosophy before
Philo, e.g. Posidonius, may be regarded as an open question.

' Cf. Hegel's philosophy of history. One might contend that
Max Weber's Religionssoziologie inaugurated a new and most fruitful
line holding a. juste milieu between the two extremes or rather doing
justice to both the material as well as the spiritual realities. But,
so far, Max Weber's Religionssoziologie has not had the following
it deserves either in his own or other countries.

* The purpose of this lecture is, as the reader will have noticed,
different from that of a number of Gifford Lecturers such as Laird
{Theism and Cosmology, 1939), Bradley {Ideals of Religion, 1907,
published 1940), J. Ward {The Realm of Ends, 191 1), who deal with
similar problems but from a purely philosophical standpoint. My
first and supreme aim here is not to prove philosophically the
truth of the Christian idea of Being but to show how different it
is from all philosophical conceptions and what its implications are.

^' Cf. Emil Brunner, Die christliche Lehre von Gott, Dogmatik
Bd. I, particularly Erster Abschnitt, Das Wesen Gottes und seine Eigen-
schqften. The opposite view and tendency is prevalent in most
Roman Catholic writers, as set forth with particular learning and
clarity in E. Gilson's Gifford Lectures, L'esprit de la phUosophie
mtdifoak.

159

i6o

NOTES AND RBFEftENGES

Before the philosopher criticises the Christian idea of creation
he ought to see and acknowledge the unbridgeable gulf which
s^arates it from its more or less monistic alternatives — a postulate
wnich is certainly not fulfilled by the treatment which Laird {Theism
and Cosmology, pp. 1 18 ff.) gives to it.

For a thoroi;^h treatment of the idea of contingency firom the
point of view of a philosopher who tries to do fulljustice to Christian
thought, see Heinrich Barth, Pkilosophie der Erscheinung, i. Teil,
AlUrtum und MittelalUr, pp. 326 ff., particularly pp. 355 ff., where
he develops this idea in its most Christian form as set forth by Petrus
Damiani.

" Cf. F. A. Lanoe, Geschichte des Matmalismus, Vol. II, p. 196.

Cf. the book of the famous mathematician, H. Weyll of
Princeton, The Open Universe.

Psalm XXXVI.

In the discussions about this lecture I was asked whether I
was not taking here the line of Berkeley's idealist philosophy.
My answer is : certainly not. First, what I have said is not a
result of philosophical reflection but an exposition of Christian
faith. Second, according to the Christian faith in God the Creator
and in the creation of the world, the reality of this created world
is firmly asserted, even if it is said that this reality is God's thought
and the product of His will. God's will — as distinguished from
God's ideas — does not enter Berkeley's argument at all.

" Karl Basth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, III. Bd., i. Teil, S. 5 und 27.

3* Cf. for instance, the sceptical philosophy of Sextus Empiricus.

^' Fexjerbach, VorUsiuigen ilber das Wesen der Religion, ed. Jodl,

S. 31.

*• It is necessary here to refer to a writer who, so far, is entirely
unknown in English-speaking countries and who shares with
Martin Buber the merit of having dbcovered the I-Thou relation :
Feiu>inand Ebner, in his work Das Wort und die geistigen Realitdten,
1 92 1. Martin Buber seems to have made his discovery independ-
ently of Ebner although a Utde later, Ich und Du, 193^. As the
third writer to whom we owe much for the understanding of the
Thou-I relation I should mention Friedrich Gogarten, wno later
on unfortunately developed an ethics of authority which led to
misuse by certain propagators of Nazi ideology. Eberhard Grise-
bach in his earlier works belongs to the same group, whilst Martin
Heidegger, outstanding as a ^hiloso[>her and as founder of what
is called the school of existentialism, is only slightly related to the
I-Thou philosophy. All these thinkers have come under the in-
fluence of SOren Kierkegaard who ought be called the founder
of a Christian philosophy of " existence ".

NOTES AND REFERENCES

l6l

Whilst thb mentality is at present more manifest in Soviet
Russia than anywhere else, it is in the making in other highly
industrialised countries as well. It is a product of the modem
age at large, and cannot but become predominant if it u not
counteracted by a strong Christian movement.

**It will have to be worked out in another context what the
distinction of God-knowledge and world-knowledge means within
the different sciences. Distinction in no way means separation.
Absolute and relative knowledge are correlative.

'* " Sonnenklarer Bericht an das gr5ssere Publikum Uber das
eigentliche Weseh der neuesten Philosophie, ein Versuch, die Leser
zum Verstehen zu zwingen", 1801, sSmtl. Wke., II, S. 334-430.

** I Cor. vni, 3, 3.

*• John XIV, 6.

** Cf. Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter ( Wahrheit als Begegmmg)
and Revelation and Reason, chapter 2.

" C/*. Plato's Phaedo, the description of the monk-like disposition
of the real philosopher, 66-7.

Plato's idea of the good, Repttblic, VI, 508, and its modem
parallel, Kant's idea of God as being the principle of practical
reason.

*• Of course Bergson's idea of durie rMle was an attempt to over-
come this spatialisation of time ; just as, in a very different way,
was Heidegger's conception of Dasein (Sein und ^nt). But both
solutions of the time problem are very different from that of
Christianity, Bergson's durie being a pantheistic or mystical mixture
of temporality and eternity, Heide^er's Dasein, on the other hand,
being correlative to life-unto-death, without a Beyond. But it is
highly important that the leading philosophers of our age are deal-
ing with the problem of time much more intensively than any
previous school of philosophy.

"James 1, 17.

" Gal. IV, 4.

«Eph. 1, 9.

my article, " Das Einmalige und der Existenzcharakter ",
in Deutscke Bl'itter JUr Philosophie, 1929 ; and Die ehrisHiehe Lehre
ton Gott, S. 385 ff.
** Matth. XXV, 13.

»» Of course it is true that Au^tine's De Civitate Dei is no phil-
osophy of history as Troeltsch pomts out (Der Historismus und seine
Pnbleme, S. 14 and note, S. 15). The question is whether anything
whidi Troeltsch would have acknowledged as philosophy would be
able to deal with that what a Christian would admowledge as Mstory.

*• Rom. vm, 38.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

" Rom. vra, i8.

*• Matt, xin, 30.

The first idealist philosophy of history is Lessing's Erziehung
ies MenschengeschUchU, lyTj and 1780, soon followed by Herder's
Ueen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784-90. I do
not know any system of philosophy of history, not even Hegel's,
which shows more clearly the traits of this optimistic evolutionism
than Schleiennacher's, embedded in his " philosophische Ethik ".

♦"The typical and most influential representative of this op-
timistic evolutionism is Auguste Gomte in his Cours de Philosophie
Positive and Systime de Politique Positive, ou traiU de sociologie, instituant
la religion de rkumaniti, 1830-54. Whilst in Comte's system the
faith in science is combined with a spiritual, although entirely
immanent element, Herbert Spencer s evolutionist philosophy
has got rid even of this remainder of religion or idealism. Spencer
puts his faith in evolution entirely on the natural process oS

differentiation " and " integration " and on the r61e of utili-
tarian thinking. The more recent idea of " emergent evolution "
— as, e.g. expounded in Laird's Gifford Lectures {Theism and
Cosmology) is a combination of speculative idealism and naturalistic
evolutionism following Bergson's neo-ScheUingian idea of ivolution
criatriee.

*^Cf. the article "Logos" in Kittel's TTuologisches Worterhuh
Vim Jhfeuen Testament, B., Der Logos in Griechentum und HeUetnsmus,
TV, 76-89.

** The above cited article " Logos " in Kittel's WSrterbuch shows
clearly both the unity and the differences of the Greek philosophical
schools, as well as the fundamental difference between all of them
and the Biblical idea of " the word of God ".

*» Cf. Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, S. 506-520.

** Cf. Delvaille, Essm star I'idie du progris jusqu'a la fin du i8mt
liicle.

Leibnitz has often been named among the ori^nators of the
idea of universal progress. Quite wrongly so. His view of the
future is rather pessimistic. There is in hu Nomeaux essais a passage
which ranks him with those prophets of fiiture European chaos
named in our first lecture. I cannot refi-ain from quoting it in
full. Speaking of the disciples of rationalist philosophers he says :
" Qui se croyant d^harg^ de I'importun^ cramte d'une providence
surveillante et d'un avenir mena5ant, lachent la bride k leurs passions
brutales, et tournent leur esprit k siduir et k corrompre les autres ;
et s'ils sont ambitieux et d'un naturel un peu dur, ils seront capables
pour leur plaisir ou avancement de mettre le feu aux quatre coins
de la terre. . . . Je trouve m£me que les opinions approchantes
s'insinuant peu k peu dans I'esprit des hommes du grand monde

NOTES AND REFERENCES

qui reglent les autres et dont dependent les aiTaires et se glissant
dans les livres k la mode disposent touUs choses d la revolution giniraU
dont V Europe est meruuie et achivent de ditruire ce qui reste encore dans
le monde de sentiments g^n^reux. . . . Ces public spirits, cpmme
les Anglais les appellent, diminuent extrtoement et ne sont plus
a la mode ; et ils cesseront d'avsuitage quand ils cesseront k 6tre
soutenu par la bonne Morale et la vraie Religion. . . . Et si
pour la grandeur ou par caprice quelqu'un versait un ddluge de sang,
iil renoersait tout en dessus dessous on compterait cela pour rien. ... Si
Ton se corrige encore de cette maladie d'esprit ipidemique dont les
mauvais effets commencent k £tre visibles, ces maux, peut-
etre, seront prevenus ; mais si elle va croissant la providence corrigera
les hommes par la revolution mime qui en doit naitre." (Leibnitz :
Op, philosoph., ed. Erdmann, p. 387.) In another place he says :
" The atheist and earthly mind propagates itself in such a manner
that one has reason to believe that the world is already in its old
age. The last sect in Christendom and in general in the world
wUl be atheism " (quoted — ^with a wrong reference — ^in E. de
Rougemont, Les deux citis, II, p. 109).

*• It b one of the most deep-seated differences between Britain
and the European continent that in English idealistic philosophy the
connection with the Christian tradition was never cut, whilst on
the continent, and particularly in German idealism (since Fichte),
it was. If ever a history of the Giiford Lectures should be written,
this fact would come to the light most strikingly. On the con-
tinent, philosophy got increasingly out of touch with theology
(whilst the reverse would not be true during the 19th century !) ;
in Great Britain the tie was never completely broken. Therefore
idealism always was somehow " Christian idealism ", even there
where it was not conscious of it or would not have been willing
to admit it. What is said above is said with regard to the con-
tinental situation. This difference accounts for many things of
which not the least is the immunity of Great Britain from totali-
tarianism.

"John I, 1 8.

•*John I, 17.

«»Gal. V, 6.

I am referring to the so-called existentialist philosophy, both
of Heidegger and of Sartre.

" Otto's famous book. The Idea of the Holy, is misleading in so
far as it describes a phenomenon of holiness as being a general
phenomenon of religion whilst it is — not in all, but in some of its
most important features — a specifically Biblical (particularly an
Old Testament) phenomenon.

'*For this sketch of Christian anthropology cf. my book, Der

164

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Mensch im Widerspruch, 1937 {Man in Revolt, 1939), where the im-
plications of the idea of GkMl-image as well as its limitations by
the reality of sin are fully dealt with.

•*So far as I know, the two historical movements have never
yet been understood from this anthropological angle. The nearest
approach is still Dilthey's Weltanschauung und Analyse its Menschen
seit der Renaissance, Ges. Schriflen, Bd. II), but with far more interest
and understanding for the Renaissance than for the Reformation.

•* Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Vorrede zur zweiten Ausgabe.

** Eddinoton, in his GifFord Lectures, The Nature of the Physical
World, 1927, in discussing the question whether there might be
other solar systems, which in themselves would be the necessary
presupposition of human life, says : " I should judge that perhaps
not one in a hundred millions of stars can have undergone this
experience in the right stage and conditions to result in the forma-
tion of a system of planets" (p. 177).

Ed. Fueter, Geschichte der exakttn Naturwissmschajien in der
sclaoeizerischm AufklSrmg, S. 33.

" Giordano Bruno, the prophet of Copemicanism, is at the
same time a fierce opponent of Christian doctrine, particularly of
Calvinism. In his allegorical-philosophical treatise, The Triumphant
Beast, he attacks the whole Christian doctrine as anthropocentric
and pardcularistic. Cf. Dilthey, op. ext., the essay on Giordano
Bruno, pp. 297-311. But Bruno's case shows clearly enough the
guilt of the contemporary church, both Roman Catholic and
Calvinist.

It is with these problems in mind that the new attempts to
restate the Christian Anthropology have been made, by myself
{Der Mensch im Widerspruch, Engl. Man in Revolt, 1937 and 1939)
and Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Giiford Lectures, Human Nature md
Human Des titty, 1941 and 1942.

What is here called " hominism " is more or less what has
in recent times been understood in English-speaking countries by
" humanism" {cf., e.g., Schiller, Humanism, 1902 ; Studies in Humanism,
1907, etc).

Psalm cxxxrx, 13-15.

Cf Jaeger, Paideia ; F. Wehrli, Vom antiken Humanitdtsbegr\ff,
«939-

About Plato's views on slavery cf. Republic, V, 469 ; IV, 331 ;
Leges, VI, 776. About the ipdividualising principle as baas of
a (moderate) caste-system, cf. Republic, III, 415 ; IV, 433, 427.

*' How abstract the idea of man is in (later) stoicism may be
seen from Epictetus' description of the universal state of the wise ;
cf. Dialogues, III, 22.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

165

** Aristotle, Niemuuhaea* Ethia, bode 8.

••Feuerbach, Vorlesungen uher das Wesen der Religion, and Das
Wesen des ChristetUums. For detailed references see Brunner,
Revelation and Reason, ch. 16. D. F. Strauss, Der alie und der neue
Glaube (1872). For Karl Marx, see his early writings edited, to-
gether with those of Engels, in the Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe
of the Marx-Engel Institut, Moskau, Frankfurt, iga?-

Cf. systems of political theory like that of Gumplowicz,
Oppenheimer, Giddings, or — with very different methods but
similar results — the formalism of Kelsen.

" I C!or. Ill, 6 ; vi, 19.

** It should be remembered that the negative valuation of bodily
appetites or instincts as " low " is not of Christian but of l^latonic
origin.

There was nothing accidental about Hider's choice of
Nietzsche's works as a present for his friend Mussolini, even though
he himself is hardly likely to have read much of them. But it
was through mediating interpreters like Bilumler {Nietzsche, der
Philosoph und PoliUker) and Spengler, Der Untergang des Aberdlandes
Mensch und Teeknik, politische Schrijften, Jahre der Entscheidutig — a book
of which more than 100,000 copies were sold — that Nietzsche's
philosophy of Wille zur Macht became predominant.

'* Cf. Dilthey, Das natiirlicitt System der Geisteswissenschaften im 77.
Jakrkmdert, op. cit., pp. go ff.

'I This lecture is a summary of my book. Justice and the Social
Order, 1943, Engl. 1945.

'*As a matter of fact the concept of natural law is already
accepted by Paul : Rom. i, 36 f ; i, 32 ; n, 14 f ; i Cor. xi, 14.

^* It is not Karl Barth who is the first opponent of natural law
but RitschI and the Ritschlian school, where the opposition to
this concept is grounded in Kantian agnosticism. Further back,
it is romantic historicism which, in jurisprudence, as well as in
theology, opposed natural law as being " unhistorical ". If the
Barthians who so valiantly fought against the Hitler state only
knew a litde more of the tustory of political thinking in Germany,
they would become aware of the fact that the fight against natural
law resulted in the abolition of all standards by which what the
present day State sees fit to declare law might be criticised.

''* Hiis positivist conception of law prevails in most of those
representatives of political science who base their juridical and
political theory on " sociological " data. It is very unfortunate
that sociology was founded as a science at a time when positivistic
evolutionism had become more or less an unquestioned axiom.

NOTES AND REFKRENCES

It u this school of naturalist sociology which bears a large share
of responsibility for the destruction of justice — in theory first, in
practice as a consequence.

Rousseau, Discours sur I'itUgaliti its hommes, Oeuvres compl.,
I, 382. Contrat Social, p. 65. The quotations are given in Brunner,
Justice and the Social Order, p. 43.

Rousseau, Contrat Social, book I, ch. 6.

Cf. Hans Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologic, in the chapter
" Ideologie und ideologisches Bewusstsein in der Philosophic von
Karl Marx", the philosophical presuppositions of the Marxian
doctrine are developed with most careful documentation from
Marx' writings.

•* Cf. Brunner, Die christliehe Lehre von Gott, ch. 15.

"* Hebr. xi, 10.

«» Gal. ni, 28.

*' I Cor. vii, 31 if.

»* Rom. vn, 15 ff.

•* Of course, Fichte's " Ich " is not simply the empirical Ego
of man. But the very fact that he substitutes for Kant's ethics of
duty his ethics of freedom shows that he u in earnest in calling the
absolute reality " Ich ". CJ. note 90.

•* Psalm vui, 6.

There can be no question that Luther and Calvin in their
fight against Roman Catholic Pelagianism, went a long way in
the direction of complete, metaphysical determinism. Cf. Luther's
De Servo Arbitrio. What they were driving at, however, was a truly
Biblical conception of freedom as being identical with independence
of God. For a more thorough treatment of this central question
of Christian anthropology see my Man in Revolt, chapters 5 and ii.

*• FiCHTE, Samtl. Wke., V, p. 479.
*^ Marx, op. cit.. Ill, p. 134.

** Donald Brinkmann, Mensch und Technik, 1946, pp. 105 ff.

*' Cf Luther's classical treatise on The Freedom of the Christian Man.

*" One can see this change in the development from the trans-
cendental idealism of Kant to the metaphysical or speculative
idealism of Fichte. For Kant, freedom is correlative to duty and
grounded in law ; for Fichte, law is identical with freedom. There
is no other law than the one to be free. See his System der Sitten-
tekre of 1 798, works IV, pp. 59 ff.
John VIII, 36.
3 Cor. m, 17.

*^ I Cor. X, 31.

NOTES AlfD REFERENCES 167

** ScHKLUNO, Ueber das VtihUUnis der bildetiden KSnste lytr JfaUir,
Wke., VII, S. 293-
** Ehil Lucka, Stu/en der Genialiiat, S. igi.

** The startling theory of Max Weber that Calvinism is one of
the roots of modern capitalism, sponsored by Ermt Troeltsch and
vndely accepted by theologians and others, has met severe criticism
and is in its original form untenable. A much more cautious
statement of the case is made by R. H. Tawney, Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism. See particularly his prefkce to the edition of
'937> PP- xi-xiv.

1

INDEX

Actus Purus, 19

Churchill, Winston, i, 3, 4, 10

Aeschylus, 91

Civilisation, i, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,

Anchoritism, 145, 146

45. 53. 58, 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 82,

Angelico, Fra, 5

93. 97. '42, 145. 146. 152, 154.

Aristotle, 9. 23. 52, 63, 92, 93, 96,

158

116, 119, 165

Civilisation, Christian, i, 4, 6, 9,

Augustine, 50, 161

10, 12

Comte, Auguste, 85, 86, 99, 162

Bach, J. S., 5, 146

Constant, Benjamin, 3

Baillie, John, 159

Constantine, 145

Earth, Hans, 166

Continuity, 20, 21 f., 46, 75, 76,

Barth, Heinrich, 160

77. 85, 122

Barth, Karl, 27, 160, 165

Copernicus, 35, 80, 81 flF., 84

Beethoven, 62, 149

Creatio Continua, 19

Boiedictines, 146

Creation, 18, 21, a6, 27, 35, 79,

Bergson, 161, 162

89, 96, 116, 118, 121, 134, 138,

Bidez, J., 159

160

Bolshevism, 3

Creator, 26, 27, 35, 51, 77, 78, 89,

Bcikdey, 25, 160

96, 100, 102, 107, 108, 116, 117,

Bousset, 162

136, 138, 140, 144, 151, 152,

Bradley, 159

157, 158, 160

Brahma, 16, 35, 130

Culture, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, II, 53, 54 f..

Brahmins, 16

61, 62, 63, 66, 69, 70, 73, 82, 92,

Brinkmaiin, D., 166

142, 145, 152, 153, 154, 158

Brunner, Emil, 159, 161,

164,

166

Damiani, P., 160

Bruno, Giordano, 84, 164

Darwin, 35, 53, 55, 56, 80, 82 f..

Bubcr, Martin, 34, 160

84. 85

Burckhardt, Jakob, 2, 159

Degas, 150

Delvaille, 162

Calvin, John, 147, 166

Democritus, 19, 35

Christian Faith, 6, 11, 13, 57,

, 63,

Determinism, 22, 130, 1*31, 132,

68. 71. 73. 86, 96, 100, 102,

105.

135. '36, 166

121, 145, 146, 152, 156, 157, 160

Dilthey, 164, 165

169

170

INDEX

Ebner, Ferdinand, 34, 160
Eddington, 81, 164
Edison, 151
Einstein, 25
Engels, 165

Enlightenment, 3, 6, 39, 53, 86, 97,

100, 145
Election, 40, 50
Epictetus, 128, 164
Erasmus, 98

Eschatology, 19, 27, 54, 72-74
Euripides, 91

Fascism, 2, 3
Fate, 18, 23

Feuerbach, 33, 98, 99, 160, 165
Fichte, 39, 85, 130, 133, 163, i66
Franklin, Benjamin, 136
Freedom, 8, 10, 11, 23, 24, 42, 43,

48, 100, 123, 127, 128, 153, 157,

166

Fueter, Ed., 164

Galileo, 35

Giddings, 165

Gide, Andr£, 134

Gilson, E., 159

Goethe, 17, 2t, 137, 149

Gogarten, Friedrich, 160

Gospel, 6, 7, 48, 50, 63, 65, 72, 73,

74, 105, ti6
Goya, 150
Grisebach, 34, 160
Grotius, Hugo, 109, 147
Gumplowicz, 165

Haeckel, Ernst, 15, 39
Hamann, 70
Hartmann, Nikolai, 134
Hcgcl, 3a, 33, 34, 53, 56, 67, 85,
98. 99i >59i >6a

Heidegger, Martin, 34, 160, 161,
163

Heraclitus, 52

Herder, 32, 53, 54, 56, 67, 162
Hesiod, 52

Hitler, Adolf, i, 114, 115, 165
Homer, 81

Humboldt, 32, 67, 85
Husserl, 34
Huyzinga, 159

Idealism, 3, 17, 18, 25, 26, 27, 31,
32. 33. 35. 4'. 46. 65, 66, 67. 68,
69. 70. 7». 75. 79. 80. 8'. 85,
86, 87, 88, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100,
loi, 139, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166

Image of God, 2, 78, 84, 88, 8g,
90,94, 118, 131, 164

Jaeger, W., 164

James, William, 34

Jesus Christ, 5. 6. 7. 9. 5i. 79.

105, 108, 118
John, Saint, 7, 43, 64, i6i, 163,

166

Kant, 25, 31, 43, 81, 85, 161, 164,

166

Karma, 23, 62

Kelsen, 165

Kepler, Johannes, 147

Kierkegaard, 31. 34. 35. 160

Kingdom of God, 6, 7, 5a, 58

Kittel, 163

Laird, 159, 160, i6a
Lamarck, 53, 55
Lange, f. A., 160
Lapl«c«, 93, 34
Laws of Nature, 22 ft., 27
Lcibnita, 17, 66, 162 f.

INDEX

17'

Lenin, 114

Lessing, 53, 54, 56, 162
Locke, John, $8

Logos, 17, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 71,

77, 78, 100, 108, 162
Lucka, Emil, 167
Luther, Martin, 146, 147, 166
Lyell, 55

Manet, 150

Marx, Karl, 3, 33, 67, 98, 99, 103,
104, 114, 124, 134, 151, 165, 166
Materialism, 18, 19, 22, 31, 32, 33,

34. 35> 37> 98, 150
Michelangelo, 5, 150
Mill, J. S., 85, 86, 99
Milton, 5, 147
Moravian community, 146
Moses, 9
Mussolini, 165

National Socialism, 2, 3, 4
Naturalism, 3, 32, 55, 98, 100, loi,
120

Natural law (Lex naturae), 24,

107, 108, 115, 116, 165
Neoplatonism, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26,

46. 52. 71. 96, 146
Neoplatonists, 48, 63
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 164
Nietzsche, 3, 47, 99, 103, 104, 135,

149. '65
Nirvana, 46, 62

Ontology, 25, 28
Oppenheimer, 165
Orders, 24 f., 108, 138
Otto, R., 163

Parmenides, 9, 46, 48
Paul, Saint, 41, 139, 165

PersonaHty, 29, 91, 93, 132, 148
"Perspectivism," 25, 29
Philo, 159
Planck, 25

Plato, 9, 16, 20, 23, 25, 31, 41, 46,
48, 63, 92, 93, 96, 116, 119, 159,
161, 164

Plotinus, 20

Posidonius, 159

Positivism, 3, 36, 37, 97, 99, 100,

no, 165
Protestant orthodoxy, 35
Proudhon, 114
Puritanism, 145, 146

Reformation, 13, 52, 73, 80, 86, 97,

115, 145, 146, 147, 164
Relativism, 30, 31
Rembrandt, 5, 61, 146, 150
Renaissance, 80, 84, 86, 88, 97,

100, 136, 146, 147, 148, 164
Revelation, 8, 2i, 25, 27, 35, 37,

38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 49, 50, 64, 65,

79, 80, 81, 88, 104, 105, 108,

140, 152, 154
Ricardo, 113
Ritschl, 165
Rougemont, E. de, 163
Rousseau, 53, 56, iii, 112, 113,

114, 124, 148, 166

Sartre, 130, 163
Scheler, Max, 34
Schelling, 149, 162, 167
Schiller, F. C. S., 32, 85, 164
Schleiermacher, 67, 162
Scholastic theology, 19
Schweizer, Albert, 159
Sextus Empiricus, 160
Socrates, 10
Solon, 107, 116

172

INDEX

Sophocles, 9 1

Spencer, Heitert, 85, 86, 99, 162
Spengler, Oswald, 1, 2, 159
Stoicism, 23, 63, 87, 92, 93, 94,

100, 107, 116, 117, 119, 164
Strauss, David F., 33, 98, 165

Tawney, R. H., 167
Theodicy, 66
Trinity, doctrine of, 38
Troeltsch, E., 161, 167

Upanishads, 16

Vasari, 147
Vedanta, 130

Ward, J., 159
Weber, Max, 159, 167
Wehrli, F., 164
Weyll, H., 160
William the Silent, 147
Word of God, 35, 41, 49, 50, 71,
79. 147. 162

Zarathustra, 64 f.
Zeus, 23